is own. Intently and long he studied each detail, nostrils,
eyebrows, ears, hair, the tips of the just-revealed teeth.

"God!" he breathed. It was hardly more than a whisper and was uttered in
all reverence.

Then--

"_God! how I've changed!_"

VIII

On the following afternoon, among the Sunday throng in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, a slender young man of inconsiderable stature, alert as
to movement, but with an expression of absent dreaming, might have been
observed giving special attention to the articles in those rooms devoted
to ancient Egypt. Doubtless, however, no one did observe him more than
casually, for, though of singularly erect carriage, he was garbed
inconspicuously in neutral tints, and his behaviour was never such as to
divert attention from the surrounding spoils of the archaeologist.

Had his mind been as an open book, he would surely have become a figure
of interest. His mental attitude was that of a professional beau of
acknowledged preeminence; he was comparing the self at home in the mummy
case with the remnants of defunct Pharaohs here exposed under glass, and
he was sniffing, in spirit, at their lack of kingly dignity and their
inferior state of preservation. Their wooden cases were often marred,
faded, and broken. Their shrouding linen was frayed and stained. Their
features were unimpressive and, in too many instances, shockingly
incomplete. They looked very little like kings, and the laudatory
recitals of their one-time greatness, translated for the contemporary
eye, seemed to be only the vapourings of third-class pugilists.

Sneering openly at a damaged Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, he reflected
that some day he would confer upon that museum a relic transcending all
others. He saw it enshrined in a room by itself; it should never be
demeaned by association with those rusty cadavers he saw about him. This
would be when he had passed on to another body, in accordance with the
law of Karma. He would leave a sum to the museum authorities,
specifically to build this room, and to it would come thousands, for a
glimpse of the superior Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period,
surviving in a state calculated to impress every beholder with his
singular merits. Ram-tah, cheated of his place in history's pantheon,
should here at last come into his own; serene, beauteous, majestic,
looking every inch a king, where mere Pharaohs looked like--like the
coffee-stained, untidy fragment