ng, perhaps, many more hands than the colonel of a
regiment commands, is now becoming well aware how much to his advantage
it is that his men should prefer a book or a reading-room to the parlor
of a public house; should understand what they are about, instead of
being merely able to go through their allotted task as so many beasts of
burden; and that they should have the strong motive of making their
homes decent and respectable, and of bettering their condition. All
these motives are now working--strongly, too--in the public mind, and
have begun to bear fruit.--_Frazer's Magazine._

[From Bartlett's "Nile Boat."]

SCENES IN EGYPT.

The Egyptian Pyramids.--How many illustrious travelers in all ages have
sat and gazed upon the scene around! and how endless are the
speculations in which they have indulged! "The epochs, the builders, and
the objects of the pyramids," says Gliddon, "had, for two thousand
years, been dreams, fallacies, or mysteries." To begin at the beginning,
some have supposed them to be antediluvian; others, that they were built
by the children of Noah to escape from a second flood--by Nimrod, by the
Pali of Hindostan, and even the ancient Irish. It was a favorite theory
until very lately, that they were the work of the captive Israelites.
The Arabians attributed them to the Jins or Genii; others to a race of
Titans. Some have supposed them to have been the granaries built by
Joseph; others, intended for his tomb, or those of the Pharaoh drowned
in the Red Sea, or of the bull Apis. Yeates thinks they soon followed
the Tower of Babel, and both had the same common design; while,
according to others, they were built with the spoils of Solomon's temple
and the riches of the queen of Sheba. They have been regarded as temples
of Venus, as reservoirs for purifying the waters of the Nile, as erected
for astronomical or mathematical purposes, or intended to protect the
valley of the Nile from the encroachments of the sands of the desert
(this notable theory, too, is quite recent); in short, for every
conceivable and inconceivable purpose that could be imagined by
superstitious awe, by erudition groping without data in the dark, or
reasoning upon the scanty and suspicious evidence of Grecian writers. At
length, after a silence of thousands of years, the discoveries of
Champollion have enabled the monuments to tell their own tale; their
mystery has been, in great measure, unraveled, and the names of their