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The huge emerald of which Herodotus speaks, as "shining with great brilliancy at night" in the temple of Melkarth at Tyre, was probably a glass cylinder, into which a lamb was introduced by the priests. In Phoenician times the pretended stone is quite as often a glass paste as a real gem, and the case is the same with the scarabs so largely used as seals.

All the statues, the carved and painted tombs, all the curious little model boats and workshops, all the painted mummies, all the amulets, the scarabs, the little funerary statuettes, all this mummery which seems to be so characteristic and so essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit in the life after death, in the ghostly duplicate of life on earth.

"A gold band of linked scarabs bound her short, thick hair straight across the forehead; thin scales of gold fell from a necklace, clothing her breasts in brilliant discolored metal, through which ivory-tinted skin showed. A belt of pure, soft gold clasped her body at the waist; gold-edged sandals clung to her little feet.

He had been smothered, taken in the act. Probably he had left his fellow-plunderers at the entrance; the roof may have looked unsafe, but he had hoped to collect all the jewels and scarabs before it gave way. Fate played him a nasty trick. The roof caved in, and we have secured all the jewels he had collected together and have learned a lesson of what must have often happened.

Well, all I can say, Jethro, is that if you don't know what I'm talking about you must be very stupid to-night. No! No! do I ever know, Jethro? He may be here and he may not. He may be off in Egypt shooting scarabs by now. He was at the farm when he wrote to me in Indiana. Well, collecting scarabs, then, Jethro. Why do you fuss so about little things? Isn't it funny strangest thing!"

Once more, necklaces and scarabs and baskets were thrust under our noses. Anthony had returned from his mysterious whisperings in cafes or mosques in the new town, and was waiting for us. Cleopatra called him, with a note of gayety in her voice, to help her off "the elephant." He came. I felt she was going to hint to him that I was in love with Monny hint to Brigit also.

"Dost Thou know that on the way back we found a man hanging from a tree?" "Oh! that is worse than the scarabs!" "He hanged himself from despair because the warriors filled the canal which he had been digging for ten years in the desert." "Well, that man is sleeping now quietly. So it is time for us." "That man was wronged," said the prince.

Arab urchins, whose hands may have once been clean, offered picture postal cards for sale; bootblacks solicited patronage and beggars asked for alms; match peddlers endeavored to dispose of their little boxes; flower sellers thrust their bouquets forward into notice; dealers in scarabs and miniature mummy cases proclaimed the virtues of their charms; and venders of beads offered endless varieties of their fanciful, colored Egyptian wares.

A pair of sandals of painted cardboard or plaited reeds; a staff for walking along the heavenly highways; a ring of enamelled ware; a bracelet or necklace of little blue beads; a tiny image of Ptah, of Osiris, of Anubis, of Hathor, or of Bast; a few mystic eyes or scarabs; and, above all, a twist or two of cord round the arm, the neck, the leg, or the body, intended to preserve the corpse from magical influences, are the only possessions of the pauper dead.

Engraved stones, generally in the shape of scarabs, seem to have been largely imported from Egypt into Assyria, where they were probably used either as amulets or as seals.