of the lips and a low hissing whistle were the only signs of life; but,
on hearing the latter, the snakes crept up and twined themselves like
living rings around his neck, legs and body. At last he rose, sang a
hymn in praise of the divine power which had made him a magician, and
then laid the greater number of his snakes in one of the chests,
retaining a few, probably his favorites, to serve as ornaments for his
neck and arms.

The second part of this performance consisted of clever conjuring-tricks,
in which he swallowed burning flax, balanced swords while dancing, their
points standing in the hollow of his eye; drew long strings and ribbons
out of the noses of the Egyptian children, exhibited the well-known cup-
and-ball trick, and, at length, raised the admiration of the spectators
to its highest pitch, by producing five living rabbits from as many
ostrich-eggs.

The Persians formed no unthankful portion of the assembled crowd; on the
contrary, this scene, so totally new, impressed them deeply.

They felt as if in the realm of miracles, and fancied they had now seen
the rarest of all Egyptian rarities. In silence they took their way back
to the handsomer streets of Sais, without noticing how many mutilated
Egyptians crossed their path. These poor disfigured creatures were
indeed no unusual sight for Asiatics, who punished many crimes by the
amputation of a limb. Had they enquired however, they would have heard
that, in Egypt, the man deprived of his hand was a convicted forger, the
woman of her nose, an adulteress; that the man without a tongue had been
found guilty of high treason or false witness; that the loss of the ears
denoted a spy, and that the pale, idiotic-looking woman yonder had been
guilty of infanticide, and had been condemned to hold the little corpse