d in the
moral application of the main idea. Verses such as these might very well
have been written by Callimachus or some other poet of the circle of the
early members of the Museum of Alexandria.

I was also obliged in this narrative to concentrate, in one limited
canvas as it were, all the features which were at once the conditions
and the characteristics of a great epoch of civilization, and to give
them form and movement by setting the history of some of the men then
living before the reader, with its complications and its denouement. All
the personages of my story grew up in my imagination from a study of the
times in which they lived, but when once I saw them clearly in outline
they soon stood before my mind in a more distinct form, like people in
a dream; I felt the poet's pleasure in creation, and as I painted them
their blood grew warm, their pulses began to beat and their spirit to
take wings and stir, each in its appropriate nature. I gave history her
due, but the historic figures retired into the background beside the
human beings as such; the representatives of an epoch became vehicles
for a Human Ideal, holding good for all time; and thus it is that
I venture to offer this transcript of a period as really a dramatic
romance.

Leipzig November 13, 1879. GEORG EBERS.

THE SISTERS.

CHAPTER I.

On the wide, desert plain of the Necropolis of Memphis stands the
extensive and stately pile of masonry which constitutes the Greek temple
of Serapis; by its side are the smaller sanctuaries of Asclepios, of
Anubis and of Astarte, and a row of long, low houses, built of unburnt
bricks, stretches away behind them as a troop of beggar children might
follow in the train of some splendidly attired king.

The more dazzlingly brilliant the smooth, yellow sandstone walls of the
temple appear in the light of the morning sun, the more squalid and mean
do the dingy houses look as they crouch in the outskirts. When the winds
blow round them and the hot sunbeams fall upon them, the dust rises
from them in clouds as from a dry path swept by the gale. Even the rooms
inside are never plastered, and as the bricks are of dried Nile-mud
mixed with chopped straw, of which the sharp little ends stick out from
the wall in every direction, the surface is as disagreeable to touch as
it is unpleasing to look at. When they were first built on the ground
between the temple itself and the wall which encloses the precincts, an