She is Bastît, a goddess of good family, the worship of whom flourished especially in the east of the delta, and she is very often drawn or named on the monuments, although they do not tell us enough of her myths or her origin. She was allied or related to the Sun, and was now said to be his sister or wife, now his daughter. She sometimes filled a beneficent and gracious rôle, protecting men against contagious diseases or evil spirits, keeping them off by the music of her sistrum: she had also her hours of treacherous perversity, during which she played with her victim as with a mouse, before finishing him off with a blow of her claws. She dwelt by preference in the city that bore her name, Poubastît, the Bubastis of classical writers. Her temple, at which Cheops and Chephrên had worked while they were building their pyramids, was rebuilt by the Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, enlarged by those of the XXVIth; when Herodotus visited it in the middle of the fifth century B.C., he considered it one of the most remarkable he had seen in the parts of Egypt through which he had travelled. It stood in the centre of the city, at the end of the market-place. It was bordered by two canals, each 100 feet wide and shaded by trees; they flowed without joining, one on the right, the other on the left of the building, almost making it an artificial island. Travellers before entering it looked over the enclosure, even into the exterior court-yards, for Bubastis had undergone the fate of many of the large cities of Egypt; in the course of ages the ground became raised in such a way that the foundations of recent houses were on a higher level than those of the temple. A big wall, decorated with pictures like the outer wall of the temple of Edfou, enclosed the temenos. The fêtes of Bastît attracted pilgrims from all parts of Egypt, as at the present day those of Sidi Ahmed el-Bedaouî draw people to the modern fair of Tantah. The people of each village crowded into large boats to get there, men and women pell-mell, with the fixed intention of enjoying themselves on the journey, a thing they never failed to do. They accompanied the slow progress of navigation with endless songs, love songs rather than sacred hymns, and there were always to be found among them flute players and castanet players to support or keep time to the voices. Whenever they passed by a town, they approached the bank as near as they could without landing, and then, while the orchestra redoubled its noise, the passengers threw volleys of insults and coarse remarks at the women standing on the bank; they retorted, and when they had exhausted words, they pulled up their petticoats and behaved indecently by way of reply. Herodotus was told that 700,000 persons, equal numbers of men and women, not reckoning little children, went thus every year to Bubastis. Entry into the temple did not calm them, far from it. They sacrificed a great number of victims with a sincere