The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

by the fire, while the Doctor rang the bell upon the
spot and ordered a supply of cigars and wine.
The conversation soon grew animated. Much curiosity was, of course, expressed in regard to the somewhat remarkable fact of Allamistakeo's still remaining
alive.
"I should have thought," observed Mr. Buckingham, "that it is high time you were dead."
"Why," replied the Count, very much astonished,
"I am little more than seven hundred years old!
My father lived a thousand, and was by no means in
his dotage when he died."
Here ensued a brisk series of questions and corn
putations, by means of which it became evident that
the antiquity of the Mummy had been grossly mis.
judged. It had been five thousand and fifty years,
and some months, since he had been consigned to the
catacombs at Eleithias.
"But my remark," resumed Mr. Buckingham,
"had no reference to your age at the period of interment; (I am willing to grant, in fact, that you are
still a young man) and my allusion was to the immensity of time during which, by your own showing,
you must have been done up in asphaltum."
" In what? " said the Count.
"In asphaltum," persisted Mr. B.
"Ah, yes; I have some faint notion of what you
mean; it might be made to answer, no doubt, - but
in my time we employed scarcely anything else than
the bichloride of mercury."
"But what we are especially at a loss to understand," said Doctor Ponnonner, "is how it happens
that, having been dead and buried in Egypt, five
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