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When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had in some measure subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances connected with it. "You remember," said he, "the night when I handed you the rough sketch I had made of the scaraboeus.
Miss Edwards, in her very interesting book, "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," thus speaks of it: "Every one knows how this scarab was adopted by the Egyptians as an emblem of creative power and the immortality of the soul; it is to be seen in the wall-sculptures, on the tombs, cut out in precious stones and worn as an ornament, buried in the mummy-cases, and a figure of the beetle forms a hieroglyph, and represents a word signifying 'To be and to transform. If actual worship was not paid to Scaraboeus Sacer, it was, at any rate, regarded with the greatest reverence and a vast amount of symbolism drawn from its various characteristics."
'After you went we found, upon a sheet of paper, a capitally executed drawing of a beetle, which, I fancy, you must have left behind you, Scaraboeus sacer, wasn't it? 'I know not what you talk of. 'Its discovery seemed to have quite a singular effect on Mr Lessingham. Now, why was that? 'I know nothing. 'Oh yes you do, and, before you go, I mean to know something too.
Sometimes it was Venice; again it was transformed into a dream of Switzerland, and again, there were the pyramids, the obelisks, the sphinxes, the giant walls and gateways of Egypt, with a Nile boat, and lotus flowers, and papyrus reeds, in reality or fac-simile, even a mummied finger and a scaraboeus ring.
He had found an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus, and, more than this, he had hunted down and secured, with Jupiter's assistance, a scaraboeus which he believed to be totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on the morrow. "And why not to-night?" I asked, rubbing my hands over the blaze, and wishing the whole tribe of scaraboei at the devil.
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