wondrous handiwork of those wondrous architects so long since dead; how
thrilling the awe with which one would penetrate down into their
interior caves--those caves in which lay buried the bones of ancient
kings, whose very names seem to have come to us almost from another
world!

But all these feelings become strangely dim, their acute edges
wonderfully worn, as the subjects which inspired them are brought near
to us. "Ah! so those are the Pyramids, are they?" says the traveller,
when the first glimpse of them is shown to him from the window of a
railway carriage. "Dear me; they don't look so very high, do they?
For Heaven's sake put the blind down, or we shall be destroyed by the
dust." And then the ecstasy and keen delight of the Pyramids has
vanished for ever.

Our friends, therefore, who for weeks past had seen from a distance,
though they had not yet visited them, did not seem to have any strong
feeling on the subject as they trotted through the grove of palm-trees.
Mr. Damer had not yet escaped from his wife, who was still fretful from
the result of her little accident.

"It was all the chattering of that Miss Dawkins," said Mrs. Damer.
"She would not let me attend to what I was doing."

"Miss Dawkins is an ass," said her husband.

"It is a pity she has no one to look after her," said Mrs. Damer. M.
Delabordeau was still listening to Miss Dawkins's raptures about Mount
Sinai. "I wonder whether she has got any money," said M. Delabordeau
to himself. "It can't be much," he went on thinking, "or she would not