we pushed our way within the swinging portal, lay around us, in
vast and solemn pyramids of portable property, the silent and touching
monuments of human existence. The busy life of a nation lay sleeping
here! Here, for example, stood that ancestral instrument for the
reckoning of winged Time, which in the native language is styled a
'Grandfather's Clock.' Hard by lay the pipe, fashioned of the 'foam of
perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn,' the pipe on which, perchance,
some swain had discoursed sweet music near the shady heights of High
Holborn. The cradle of infancy, the gamp of decrepitude, the tricycle
of fleeting youth, the paraffin lamp which had lighted bridal gaiety,
the flask which had held the foaming malt,--all were gathered here, and
the dust lay deep on all of them!

I was about to make some appropriate moral remarks, when I heard
Leonora (whose command of tongues is simply _marvellous_) address an
attendant priestess in the local dialect.

'Here, miss,' said she, ''ow much can yer let us 'ave on this 'ere
ticker?' (producing her watch).

The priestess, whose clear-cut features and two lovely black eyes
betrayed a mixture of Semitic blood, was examining the 'turnip'--as she
called the watch--when Leonora, saying 'Mum's the word,' rather
violently called my attention (with her elbow) to a strange parcel
lying apart from the rest.

It was a long bundle, as long as a man, and was swathed in cerements of
white Egyptian tissue.

''Tis you! 'tis you!' I sneezed rapturously, recognising the object of
our search, the very mummy which, two thousand years ago, Theodolite
had prepared with her own fair but cruel hands.

There, beyond the shadow of doubt, lay all that was mortal of the
unlucky Jambres! On the tissue which wrapped the bundle I distinctly
recognised _the stencilled mark corresponding to Leonora's scarab_, a
duck, the egg of a duck, and an umbrella.[24]

[24]
See cover. Most important to have this cover bound in _sur
brochure_.--PUBLISHER.

'How much,' said I to the priestess of the temple, 'could you afford to
let me have that old bundle of rags for?'

'That old bundle of rags?' said the woman, 'Take it, dear lady, take it
and keep it (if you can), and the blessing of Abraham be on your head!'

So anxious was she to part with the mummy that we could hardly get her
to accept a merely nominal price. To give plausibility to the purchase,
we said we wanted the rags for a paper