eagerly, as if bidding defiance to some adversary; he put it in his
money bag, threw a few more rings at the feet of the witch, and once
more hastily demanded a bowl of Nile-water.

"Is my lord in such a hurry?" muttered the old woman, once more going
into the cave. "He asks if I know him? him certainly I do? but
the darling? who can it be hereabouts? perhaps little Uarda at the
paraschites yonder. She is pretty enough; but she is lying on a mat, run
over and dying. We must see what my lord means. He would have pleased
me well enough, if I were young; but he will reach the goal, for he is
resolute and spares no one."

While she muttered these and similar words, she filled a graceful cup of
glazed earthenware with filtered Nile-water, which she poured out of a
large porous clay jar, and laid a laurel leaf, on which was scratched
two hearts linked together by seven strokes, on the surface of the
limpid fluid. Then she stepped out into the air again.

As Paaker took the vessel from her looked at the laurel leaf, she said:

"This indeed binds hearts; three is the husband, four is the wife,
seven is the chachach, charcharachacha."--[This jargon is fund in a
magic-papyrus at Berlin.]

The old woman sang this spell not without skill; but the Mohar appeared
not to listen to her jargon. He descended carefully into the valley, and
directed his steps to the resting place of the wife of Mena.

By the side of a rock, which hill him from Nefert, he paused, set the
cup on a flat block of stone, and drew the flask with the philter out of
his girdle.

His fingers trembled, but a thousand voices seemed to surge up and cry:

"Take it!--do it!--put in the drink!--now or never." He felt like a
solitary traveller, who finds on his road the last will of a relation
whose possessions he had hoped for, but which disinherits him. Shall he
surrender it to the judge, or shall he destroy it.

Paaker was not merely outwardly devout; hitherto he had in everything
intended to act according to the prescriptions of the religion of his
fathers. Adultery was a heavy sin; but had not he an older right to
Nefert than the king's charioteer?

He who followed the black arts of magic, should, according to the law,
be punished by death, and the old woman had a bad name for her evil
arts; but he had not sought her for the sake of the philter. Was it not
possible that the Manes of his forefathers, that the Gods themselves,
moved by his prayers and offeri