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

while alive, are alive. Even some of those purposely
so embalmed may have been overlooked by their
executors, and still remain in the tombs."
"Will you be kind enough to explain," I said,
" what you mean by ' purposely so embalmed'?"
" With great pleasure," answered the Mummy, after
surveying me leisurely through his eye-glass —for it
was the first time I had ventured to address him a
direct question.
" With great pleasure," he said. "The usual duration of man's life, in my time, was about eight hundred
years. Few men died, unless by most extraordinary
accident, before the age of six hundred; few lived
longer than a decade of centuries; but eight were
considered the natural term. After the discovery of
the embalming principle, as I have already described
it to you, it occurred to our philosophers that a laudable curiosity might be gratified, and, at the same
time, the interests of science much advanced, by
living this natural term in instalments. In the case
of history, indeed, experience demonstrated that something of this kind was indispensable. An historian,
for example, having attained the age of five hundred,
would write a book with great labor and then get himself carefully embalmed; leaving instructions to his
executors pro. tem., that they should cause him to be
revivified after the lapse of a certain period- say five
or six hundred years. Resuming existence at the
expiration of this time, he would invariably find his
great work converted into a species of hap-hazard
note-book —that is to say, into a kind of literary
arena for the conflicting guesses, riddles, and personal
squabbles of whole herds of exasperated commentators. These guesses, etc., which passed under the
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