d not fail to make the flowers talk to
him, in the imagination, of the delights of life. In one case a fig-tree
is made to call to a passing maiden to come into its shade.

"Come," it says, "and spend this festal day, and
to-morrow, and the day after to-morrow, sitting in my
shadow. Let thy lover sit at thy side, and let him
drink.... Thy servants will come with the
dinner-things--they will bring drink of every kind, with
all manner of cakes, flowers of yesterday and of to-day,
and all kinds of refreshing fruit."

Than this one could hardly find a more convincing indication of the
gaiety of the Egyptian temperament. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries A.D. the people were so oppressed that any display of luxury
was discouraged, and a happy smile brought the tax-gatherer to the door
to ascertain whether it was due to financial prosperity. But the
carrying of flowers, and other indications of a kind of unworried
contentment, are now again becoming apparent on all sides.

[Illustration: PL. IX. A garland of leaves and flowers dating from about
B.C. 1000. It was placed upon the neck of a
mummy.
--CAIRO MUSEUM.]

[_Photo by E. Brugsch Pasha._

The affection displayed by the Egyptians for bright colours would alone
indicate that their temperament was not melancholic. The houses of the
rich were painted with colours which would be regarded as crude had they
appeared in the Occident, but which are admissible in Egypt where the
natural brilliancy of the sunshine and the scenery demands a more
extreme colour-scheme in decoration. The pavilions in which the nobles
"made a happy day," as they phrased it, were painted with the most
brilliant wall-decorations, and the delicately-shaped lotus columns
supporting the roof were striped with half a dozen colours, and were
hung with streamers of linen. The ceilings and pavements seem to have
afforded the artists a happy field for a display of their originality
and skill, and it is on these stretches of smooth-plastered surface that
gems of Egyptian art are often found. A pavement from the palace of
Akhnaton at Tell el Amarna shows a scene in which a cow is depicted
frisking through the reeds, and birds are represented flying over the
marshes. In the palace of Amenhotep III. at Gurneh there was a ceiling
decoration representing a flight of doves, wh