"Say rather," answered Amasis rising from his seat, "we, with our Greek minds, believe a beautiful life to be the highest good. But Croesus, I was begotten and nursed by Egyptian parents, nourished on Egyptian food, and though I have accepted much that is Greek, am still, in my innermost being, an Egyptian. What has been sung to us in our childhood, and praised as sacred in our youth, lingers on in the heart until the day which sees us embalmed as mummies. I am an old man and have but a short span yet to run, before I reach the landmark which separates us from that farther country. For the sake of life's few remaining days, shall I willingly mar Death's thousands of years? No, my friend, in this point at least I have remained an Egyptian, in believing, like the rest of my countrymen, that the happiness of a future life in the kingdom of Osiris, depends on the preservation of my body, the habitation of the soul. [Each human soul was considered as a part of the world-soul Osiris, was united to him after the death of the body, and thenceforth took the name of Osiris. The Egyptian Cosmos consisted of the three great realms, the Heavens, the Earth and the Depths. Over the vast ocean which girdles the vault of heaven, the sun moves in a boat or car drawn by the planets and fixed stars. On this ocean too the great constellations circle in their ships, and there is the kingdom of the blissful gods, who sit enthroned above this heavenly ocean under a canopy of stars. The mouth of this great stream is in the East, where the sun-god rises from the mists and is born again as a child every morning. The surface of the earth is inhabited by human beings having a share in the three great cosmic kingdoms. They receive their soul from the heights of heaven, the seat and source of light; their material body is of the earth; and the appearance or outward form by which one human being is distinguished from another at sight--his phantom or shadow--belongs to the depths. At death, soul, body, and shadow separate from one another. The soul to return to the place from whence it came, to Heaven, for it is a part of God (of Osiris); the body, to be committed to the earth from which it was formed in the image of its creator; the phantom or shadow, to descend into the depths, the kingdom of shadows. The gate to this kingdom was placed in the West among the sunset hills, where the sun goes down daily,--where he dies. Thence arise the changeful and corresponding conceptions connected with rising and setting, arriving and departing, being born and dying. The careful preservation of the body after death from destruction, not only through the process of inward decay, but also through violence or accident, was in the religion of ancient Egypt a principal condition