yrtle and honeysuckle, under three ancient cedar trees, were four
graves; three of slaves long dead and the other of the half-witted boy.

Under the fresh green sod of the newer grave I buried the dead bird, and
marked the spot with little cedar grave boards, on which I carved the
name, "Santa." What a place to bury a king who had built a great pyramid
for his sepulchre!

A CONSCIOUS MUMMY.

I sat under the old elm trees reading a work on Early Egyptian
Civilization, which declared that the recorded history of that ancient
people began when Menes was king, about 4300 B. C.

Placing the book, back up on the ground, I thought of their strange
faith; the reverent care with which they embalmed the body to be again
occupied by the soul, when, after many transmigrations from one animal
to another, having expiated all sins done in the body, it should return
purified to the old body. Assuming their belief true, where now might be
those ancient believers in Osiris, Ra, Horus, Isis, Set and other nature
gods, having ages before bowed in submission to Bes, the god of death?

How limited is sense; how weak intellect; how short bodily life. Yet the
very frailty and uncertainty of life establishes the immortality of the
soul and the soul, in turn, gives spontaneous testimony to God and of a
life within which the body does not own.

Nature was enjoying her afternoon siesta. Over the hills so far away as
to make it a picture, a threshing machine was eating wheat shocks and
blowing forth a golden dust-like breath of straw. The incessant sawing
of harvest flies, a heavy country dinner and the afternoon glow and heat
conspired to drive me into the springhouse, where the coolness and peace
of the place brought a bodily laziness, and, lying down on the old stone
shelf, I slept.

Three walls of the springhouse grew as the palace walls of Aladdin; the
front rolled up as the curtain for a drama; and between great columns of
red granite and porphyry, chiseled with hieroglyphics and decorated
with the symbols of Amun and Osiris, I looked out upon a grove of date
palms, the pyramid of Sneferru, an island sea of yellow flood water, and
yet beyond, the low hills of Arabia. A view seemingly as familiar as the
one from my bedroom window.

It was the Nile valley at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then
nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the
valley has been filled by river silt and the tide is much shallo