present themselves in the most astonishing variety. The style is very marked and finely executed, but it is clear that the Egyptians had not then that peculiar canon of proportion which we find universally at a later period.[10] The painting on the fine plaster is often more beautiful than could be expected, and occasionally exhibits the freshness of yesterday in perfect preservation. The subjects on the walls are usually representations of scenes from the life of departed persons, and seem mostly intended to place their riches, cattle, fish, boats, hunts, and servants, before the eyes of the observer. Through them we become acquainted with every particular of their private life. The numerous inscriptions describe or name these scenes, or they set forth the often widely-extended family of the departed, and all his offices and titles, so that I could almost write a Court and State Directory of the time of King Cheops, or Chephren. The most stately tombs or rock graves belonged chiefly to the princes, relations, or highest officers of those kings near whose pyramids they are situated; and not unfrequently I have found the graves of father, son, grandson, and even great-grandson; so that whole genealogies of those distinguished families, the nobility of the land fifty centuries ago, may be formed. The most beautiful of the tombs, which I have discovered among many others in the all-burying sand, belongs to a prince[11] of King Cheops. I employ forty to sixty people every day in excavations and similar labours. Also before the great Sphinx I have had excavations made to bring to light the temple between its paws, and to lay open the colossal stele formed of one block of granite, eleven feet high and seven feet broad, serving as a back wall to the temple, and covered to about its own height with sand. It is one of the few memorials here of the great Pharaohs of the New Empire, after the expulsion of the Hyksos. I have had a plaster cast taken of it. The Egyptian winter is not always so spring-like as one occasionally imagines in Europe. At sunrise, when every one hurries to work, we have already had +5° Réaumur, so that the artists could hardly use their fingers.