highest efficacy.

There was the lapis lazuli eye, which hung to his girdle by a gold chain;
When he threw it on the ground, so as to lie on the earth, if its
engraved side turned to heaven, and its smooth side lay on the ground, he
said "yes;" in the other case, on the contrary, "no." In his purse lay
always a statuette of the god Apheru, who opened roads; this he threw
down at cross-roads, and followed the direction which the pointed snout
of the image indicated. He frequently called into council the seal-ring
of his deceased father, an old family possession, which the chief priests
of Abydos had laid upon the holiest of the fourteen graves of Osiris, and
endowed with miraculous power. It consisted of a gold ring with a broad
signet, on which could be read the name of Thotmes III., who had long
since been deified, and from whom Paaker's ancestors had derived it. If
it were desirable to consult the ring, the Mohar touched with the point
of his bronze dagger the engraved sign of the name, below which were
represented three objects sacred to the Gods, and three that were, on the
contrary, profane. If he hit one of the former, he concluded that his
father--who was gone to Osiris--concurred in his design; in the contrary
case he was careful to postpone it. Often he pressed the ring to his
heart, and awaited the first living creature that he might meet,
regarding it as a messenger from his father;--if it came to him from
the right hand as an encouragement, if from the left as a warning.

By degrees he had reduced these questionings to a system. All that he
found in nature he referred to himself and the current of his life. It
was at once touching, and pitiful, to see how closely he lived with the
Manes of his dead. His lively, but not exalted fancy, wherever he gave
it play, presented to the eye of his soul the image of his father and of
an elder brother who had died early, always in the same spot, and almost