n the lotus flowers listen placidly to the
lute-player's music, their beaks resting on their crops. They have learned
by experience not to put themselves out of the way for a song, and they
know that there is nothing to fear from a young girl, unless she is armed.
They are put to flight in the bas-reliefs by the mere sight of a bow and
arrows, just as a company of rooks is put to flight nowadays by the sight
of a gun. The Egyptians were especially familiar with the ways of animals
and birds, and reproduced them with marvellous exactness. The habit of
minutely observing minor facts became instinctive, and it informed their
most trifling works with that air of reality which strikes us so forcibly
at the present day.

[Illustration: Fig. 254.--Spoon.]

Household furniture was no more abundant in ancient Egypt than it is in the
Egypt of to-day. In the time of the Twelfth Dynasty an ordinary house
contained no bedsteads, but low frameworks like the Nubian _angareb_; or
mats rolled up by day on which the owners lay down at night in their
clothes, pillowing their heads on earthenware, stone, or wooden head-rests.
There were also two or three simple stone seats, some wooden chairs or
stools with carved legs, chests and boxes of various sizes for clothes and
tools, and a few common vessels of pottery or bronze. For making fire there
were fire-sticks, and the bow-drill for using them (figs. 255 and 181);
children's toys were even then found in great variety though of somewhat
quaint construction. There were dolls with wigs and movable limbs, made in
stone, pottery, and wood (fig. 256); figures of men, and animals, and
terra-cotta boats, balls of wood and stuffed leather, whip-tops, and tip-
cats (fig. 257).

[Illustration: Fig. 255.--Fire-sticks, bow, and unfinished drill-stock,
Twelfth Dynasty; _Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob,_ W.M.F. Petrie, Plate VII., p.
11.]

[Illustration: Fig. 256.--Remains of two Twelfth Dynasty dolls; _Kahun,
Gurob and Hawara,_ W.M.F. Petrie, Plate VIII. p. 30.]

[Illustration: Fig. 257.--Tops, tip-cat, and a terra-cotta toy boat,
Twelfth Dynasty; _Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara,_ W.M.F. Petrie, Plates VIII.,
IX., p. 30.]

[Illustration: Fig. 258.--Chest]

[Illustration: Fig. 259.--Chest.]

[Illustration: Fig. 260.--Chest.]

The art of the cabinet-maker was nevertheless carried to a high degree of
perfection, from the time of the ancient dynasties. Planks were dressed
down with the adze, mortised, glued,