nterest to the specimen. You notice that the black coating leaves the
principal decoration and the whole of the inscription untouched, which
is precisely the part that one would expect to find covered up; whereas
the feet and the back, which probably bore no writing, are quite thickly
encrusted. If you stoop down, you can see that the bitumen was daubed
freely into the lacings of the back, where it served no purpose, so that
even the strings are embedded." He stooped, as he spoke, and peered up
inquisitively at the back of the mummy, where it was visible between the
supports.

"Has Doctor Norbury any explanation to offer?" asked Miss Bellingham.

"None whatever," replied Mr. Jellicoe. "He finds it as great a mystery
as I do. But he thinks that we may get some suggestion from the Director
when he comes back. He is a very great authority, as you know, and a
practical excavator of great experience too. But I mustn't stay here
talking of these things, and keeping you from your pottery. Perhaps I
have stayed too long already. If I have I ask your pardon, and I will
now wish you a very good afternoon." With a sudden return to his
customary wooden impassivity, he shook hands with us, bowed stiffly, and
took himself off towards the curator's office.

"What a strange man that is," said Miss Bellingham, as Mr. Jellicoe
disappeared through the doorway at the end of the room, "or perhaps I
should say, a strange being, for I can hardly think of him as a man. I
have never met any other human creature at all like him."

"He is certainly a queer old fogey," I agreed.

"Yes, but there is something more than that. He is so emotionless, so
remote and aloof from all mundane concerns. He moves among ordinary men
and women, but as a mere presence, an unmoved spectator of their
actions, quite dispassionate and impersonal."

"Yes, he is astonishingly self-contained; in fact, he seems, as you say,
to go to and fro among men, enveloped in a sort of infernal atmosphere
of his own, like Marley's ghost. But he is lively and human enough as
soon as the subject of Egyptian antiquities is broached."

"Lively, but not human. He is always, to me, quite unhuman. Even when he
is most interested, and even enthusiastic, he is a mere personification
of knowledge. Nature ought to have furnished him with an ibis' head like
Tahuti; then he would have looked his part."

"He would have made a rare sensation in Lincoln's Inn if she had," said
I; and we bot