ildewed door of the Place of Bones.

Why is it, one asks, that archaeology is a thing so misunderstood? Can it
be that both lecturer and audience have crushed down that which was in
reality uppermost in their minds: that a shy search for romance has led
these people to the Town Hall? Or perchance archaeology has become to
them something not unlike a vice, and to listen to an archaeological
lecture is their remaining chance of being naughty. It may be that,
having one foot in the grave, they take pleasure in kicking the moss
from the surrounding tombstones with the other; or that, being denied,
for one reason or another, the jovial society of the living, like Robert
Southey's "Scholar" their hopes are with the dead.

[Illustration: PL. VI. A relief upon the side of the sarcophagus of one
of the wives of King Mentuhotep III., discovered
at Der el Bahri (Thebes). The royal lady is taking
sweet-smelling ointment from an alabaster vase.
A handmaiden keeps the flies away with a
bird's-wing fan.
--CAIRO MUSEUM.]

[_Photo by E. Brugsch Pasha._

Be the explanation what it may, the fact is indisputable that archaeology
is patronised by those who know not its real meaning. A man has no more
right to think of the people of old as dust and dead bones than he has
to think of his contemporaries as lumps of meat. The true archaeologist
does not take pleasure in skeletons as skeletons, for his whole effort
is to cover them decently with flesh and skin once more, and to put
some thoughts back into the empty skulls. He sets himself to hide again
the things which he would not intentionally lay bare. Nor does he
delight in ruined buildings: rather he deplores that they are ruined.
Coleridge wrote like the true archaeologist when he composed that most
magical poem "Khubla Khan"--

"In Xanadu did Khubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."

And those who would have the pleasure-domes of the gorgeous Past
reconstructed for them must turn to the archaeologist; those who would
see the damsel with the dulcimer in the gardens of Xanadu must ask of
him the secret, and of none o