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

before the silent member again touched me quietly on
the elbow, and begged me for God's sake to take a
peep at Diodorus Siculus. As for the Count, he
merely asked me, in the way of reply, if we moderns
possessed any such microscopes as would enable us to
cut cameos in the style of the Egyptians. While I
was thinking how I should answer this question, little
Doctor Ponnonner committed himself in a very extraordinary way.
" Look at our architecture!" he exclaimed, greatly
to the indignation of both the travellers, who pinched
him black and blue to no purpose.
" Look," he cried with enthusiasm, "at the BowlingGreen Fountain in New York! or if this be too vast a
contemplation, regard for a moment the Capitol at
Washington, D. C.!"- and the good little medical
man went on to detail, very minutely, the proportions
of the fabric to which he referred. He explained that
the portico alone was adorned with no less than four
and twenty columns, five feet in diameter, and ten feet
apart.
The Count said that he regretted not being able to
remember, just at that moment, the precise dimensions
of any one of the principal buildings of the city of
Aznac, whose foundations were laid in the night of
Time, but the ruins of which were still standing, at
the epoch of his entombment, in a vast plain of sand
to the westward of Thebes. He recollected, however
(talking of porticos), that one, affixed to an inferior
palace in a kind of suburb called Carnac, consisted of
a hundred and forty-four columns, thirty-seven feet
each in circumference, and twenty-five feet apart.
The approach of this portico, from the Nile, was
through an avenue two miles long, composed of
303