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.

SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY

one had been recently discovered by the engineers
employed to bore for water in the Great Oasis.
I then mentioned our steel; but the foreigner elevated his nose, and asked me if our steel could have
executed the sharp carved work seen on the obelisks,
and which was wrought altogether by edge-tools of
copper
This disconcerted us so greatly that we thought it
advisable to vary the attack to Metaphysics. We sent
for a copy of a book called the " Dial," and read out
of it a chapter or two about something which is not
very clear, but which the Bostonians call the " Great
Movement" or " Progress."
The Count merely said that "Great Movements"
were awfully common things in his day, and as for
" Progress," it was at one time quite a nuisance, but
it never progressed.
We then spoke of the great beauty and importance
of Democracy, and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we
enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum,
and no king.
He listened with marked interest, and in fact seemed
not a little amused When we had done, he said that,
a great while ago, there had occurred something of a
very similar sort. Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and so set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind. They assembled their wise men, and concocted the most ingenious
constitution it is possible to conceive. For a while
they managed remarkably well; only their habit of
bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however,
in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some
fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and inVOL. 11.-20 305