e foot of the Princess Hermonthis! It is very little,
too little, in fact, for an authentic foot," said the dealer, shaking
his head and rolling his eyes with a peculiar rotary motion. "Very well,
take it, and I will throw in the outer covering," he said, rolling it in
a shred of old damask--"very beautiful, genuine damask, which has never
been redyed; it is strong, yet it is soft," he muttered, caressing the
frayed tissue, in accordance with his dealer's habit of praising an
article of so little value, that he himself thought it good for nothing
but to give away.

He dropped the gold pieces into a kind of medieval pouch which was
fastened at his belt, while he repeated:

"The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to be used for a paper weight!"

Then, fastening upon me his phosphorescent pupils he said, in a voice
strident as the wails of a cat which has just swallowed a fish bone:

"Old Pharaoh will not be pleased; he loved his daughter--that dear man."

"You speak of him as though you were his contemporary; no matter how old
you may be, you do not date back to the pyramids of Egypt," I answered
laughingly from the threshold of the shop.

I returned home, delighted with my purchase.

To make use of it at once, I placed the foot of the exalted Princess
Hermonthis on a stack of papers--sketches of verses, undecipherable
mosaics of crossed out words, unfinished articles, forgotten letters,
posted in the desk drawer, a mistake often made by absent-minded people;
the effect was pleasing, bizarre, and romantic.

Highly delighted with this decoration, I went down into the street, and
took a walk with all the importance and pride proper to a man who has
the inexpressible advantage over the passersby he elbows, of possessing
a fragment of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.

I thought people who did not possess, like myself, a paper weight so
genuinely Egyptian, were objects of ridicule, and it seemed to me the
proper business of the sensible man to have a mummy's foot upon his
desk.

Happily, an encounter with several friends distracted me from my
raptures over my recent acquisition, I went to dinner with them, for it
would have been hard for me to dine alone.

When I returned at night, with my brain somewhat muddled by the effects
of a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of oriental perfume tickled
delicately my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the
natron, the bitumen, and the myrrh in which t