ly 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 offerings, had put him in possession by an
accident--which was almost a miracle--of the magic potion efficacy he
never for an instant doubted?

Paaker's associates held him to be a man of quick decision, and, in fact,
in difficult cases he could act with unusual rapidity, but what guided
him in these cases, was not the swift-winged judgment of a prepared and
well-schooled brain, but usually only resulted from the outcome of a play
of question and answer.

Amulets of the most various kinds hung round his neck, and from his
girdle, all consecrated by priests, and of special sanctity or the
highest efficacy.

There was the lapis lazuli eye, which hung to his girdle by a gold chain;
When he threw it on the ground, so as to lie on the earth, if its
engraved side turned to heaven, and its smooth side lay on the ground, he
said "yes;" in the other case, on the contrary, "no." In his purse lay
always a statuette of the god Apheru, who opened roads; this he threw
down at cross-roads, and followed the direction which the pointed snout
of the image indicated. He frequently called into council the seal-ring
of his deceased father, an old family possession, which the chief priests
of Abydos had laid upon the holiest of the fourteen graves of Osiris, and
endowed with miraculous power. It consisted of a gold ring with a