coarse wooden chair, with a round table in the centre, which bore the
remains of a meal. As the visitor's eye glanced round he could not but
remark with an ever-recurring thrill that all the small details of
the room were of the most quaint design and antique workmanship. The
candlesticks, the vases upon the chimney-piece, the fire-irons, the
ornaments upon the walls, were all such as he had been wont to associate
with the remote past. The gnarled heavy-eyed man sat himself down upon
the edge of the bed, and motioned his guest into the chair.

"There may be design in this," he said, still speaking excellent
English. "It may be decreed that I should leave some account behind as a
warning to all rash mortals who would set their wits up against workings
of Nature. I leave it with you. Make such use as you will of it. I speak
to you now with my feet upon the threshold of the other world.

"I am, as you surmised, an Egyptian--not one of the down-trodden race
of slaves who now inhabit the Delta of the Nile, but a survivor of that
fiercer and harder people who tamed the Hebrew, drove the Ethiopian back
into the southern deserts, and built those mighty works which have been
the envy and the wonder of all after generations. It was in the reign
of Tuthmosis, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, that
I first saw the light. You shrink away from me. Wait, and you will see
that I am more to be pitied than to be feared.

"My name was Sosra. My father had been the chief priest of Osiris in
the great temple of Abaris, which stood in those days upon the Bubastic
branch of the Nile. I was brought up in the temple and was trained in
all those mystic arts which are spoken of in your own Bible. I was
an apt pupil. Before I was sixteen I had learned all which the wisest
priest could teach me. From that time on I studied Nature's secrets for
myself, and shared my knowledge with no man.

"Of all the questions which attracted me there were none over which I
laboured so long as over those which concern themselves with the nature
of life. I probed deeply into the vital principle. The aim of medicine
had been to drive away disease when it appeared. It seemed to me that a
method might be devised which should so fortify the body as to prevent
weakness or death from ever taking hold of it. It is useless that I
should recount my researches. You would scarce comprehend them if I
did. They were carried out partly upon animals, partly upon