e have also a young girl
in the Louvre collection, but she stands in a maze of lotus plants (fig.
250), and is in the act of gathering a bud. A bunch of stems, from which
emerge two full-blown blossoms, unites the handle to the bowl of the spoon,
which is in reverse position, the larger end being turned outwards and the
point inwards. Elsewhere, a young girl (fig. 251) playing upon a long-
necked lute as she trips along, is framed in by two flowering stems.
Sometimes the fair musician is standing upright in a tiny skiff (fig. 252);
and sometimes a girl bearing offerings is substituted for the lute player.
Another example represents a slave toiling under the weight of an enormous
sack. The age and physiognomy of each of these personages is clearly
indicated. The lotus gatherer is of good birth, as may be seen by her
carefully plaited hair and tunic. The Theban ladies wore long robes; but
this damsel has gathered up her skirts that she may thread her way among
the reeds without wetting her garments. The two musicians and the swimming
girl belong, on the contrary, to an inferior, or servile, class. Two of
them wear only a girdle, and the third has a short garment negligently
fastened. The bearer of offerings (fig. 253) wears the long pendent tresses
distinctive of childhood, and is one of those slender, growing girls of the
fellahin class whom one sees in such numbers on the banks of the Nile. Her
lack of clothing is, however, no evidence of want of birth, for not even
the children of nobility were wont to put on the garments of their sex
before the period of adolescence. Lastly, the slave (fig. 254), with his
thick lips, his high shoulders, his flat nose, his heavy, animal jaw, his
low brow, and his bare, conical head, is evidently a caricature of some
foreign prisoner. The dogged sullenness with which he trudges under his
burden is admirably caught, while the angularities of the body, the type of
the head, and the general arrangement of the parts, remind one of the
terra-cotta grotesques of Asia Minor. In these subjects, all the minor
details, the fruits, the flowers, the various kinds of birds, are rendered
with much truth and cleverness. Of the three ducks which are tied by the
feet and slung over the arms of the girl bearing offerings, two are
resigned to their fate, and hang swinging with open eyes and outstretched
necks; but the third flaps her wings and lifts her head protestingly. The
two small water-fowl perched upo