savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the
spirits of the dead.

An example of this endurance, this secular survival of belief, may
be more instructive and is certainly more entertaining than a world
of assertions. In his Etudes Egyptiennes (Tome i. fascic. 2) M.
Maspero publishes the text and translation of a papyrus fragment.
This papyrus was discovered still attached to a statuette in wood,
representing 'the singer of Ammen, Kena,' in ceremonial dress. The
document is a letter written by an ancient Egyptian scribe, 'To the
Instructed Khou of the Dame Onkhari,' his own dead wife, the Khou,
or Khu, being the spirit of that lady. The scribe has been
'haunted' since her decease, his home has been disturbed, he asks
Onkhari what he has done to deserve such treatment: 'What wrong
have I been guilty of that I should be in this state of trouble?
what have I done that thou should'st help to assail me? no crime has
been wrought against thee. From the hour of my marriage till this
day, what have I wrought against thee that I need conceal?'

He vows that, when they meet at the tribunal of Osiris, he will have
right on his side.

This letter to the dead is deposited in the tomb of the dead, and we
may trust that the scribe was no longer annoyed by a Khou, which
being instructed, should have known better. To take another ancient
instance, in his Philopseudes Lucian introduces a kind of club of
superstitious men, telling ghost stories. One of them assures his
friend that the spectre of his late wife has visited and vexed him,
because he had accidentally neglected to burn one of a pair of gilt
shoes, to which she was attached. She indicated the place where the