don't you? Well, those things burrowed in the earth, the mud of the
Nile, at a certain period of their season to lay their eggs, and the
next spring, or whenever it was, the eggs would hatch and the beetles
would come up. Then the Egyptians imagined that the beetle hadn't died
at all, or if it had that it also had the power of restoring itself to
life, possessed immortality. So they thought it must be a god and began
to worship it," and he would pause and survey me with those amazing
eyes, bright as glass beads, to see if I were properly impressed.

"You don't say!"

"Sure. That's where the worship came from," and then he might go on and
add a bit about monkey-worship, the Zoroastrians and the Parsees, the
sacred bull of Egypt, its sex power as a reason for its religious
elevation, and of sex worship in general; the fantastic orgies at Sidon
and Tyre, where enormous images of the male and female sex organs were
carried aloft before the multitude.

Being totally ignorant of these matters at the time, not a rumor of them
having reached me as yet in my meagre reading, I knew that it must be
so. It fired me with a keen desire to read--not the old orthodox
emasculated histories of the schools but those other books and pamphlets
to which I fancied he must have access. Eagerly I inquired of him where,
how. He told me that in some cases they were outlawed, banned or not
translated wholly or fully, owing to the puritanism and religiosity of
the day, but he gave me titles and authors to whom I might have access,
and the address of an old book-dealer or two who could get them for me.

In addition he was interested in ethnology and geology, as well as
astronomy (the outstanding phases at least), and many, many phases of