and joyous piety; then they drank deeply from morning to evening, and from evening to morning, as long as the festival lasted: more wine was consumed in a few days than in all the rest of the year put together. The greater number of the pilgrims, before returning home, left a souvenir of their visit at the feet of Bastît. It was a votive stele with a fine inscription, and a picture showing the donor worshipping his goddess; or a statuette in blue or green pottery, or if they were wealthy, in bronze, silver, or sometimes gold: the goddess would be standing, seated, crouching with a woman’s body and a cat’s head, a sistrum or an ægis in her hand. During the Greek period the figures were in bronze or in painted and gilded wood surmounted by a cat’s head in bronze. Many were life-size and modelled with elaborate art; they had eyes of enamel, a gilded necklace round the neck, earrings, and amulets on the forehead. It sometimes happened that when a cat he particularly venerated died in his house, the pilgrim embalmed it according to the rites: he took the mummy with him, and, arrived at Bubastis, shut it up in one of the figures he offered. These various objects, at first placed anywhere in the temple, would quickly have filled it, if some remedy had not been found. They were piled up provisionally at the end of one of the secondary chambers, then thrown outside, and there encountered diverse fortunes. I do not think I am calumniating the Egyptian priests in saying that it must have been a great grief to them to part with so many precious gifts without trying to derive some honest profit from them. The gold and silver figures did not endure; they quickly went into the melting-pot, and few emerge from the ruins, but the bronze and copper were so abundant that there would have been little to gain in melting down the cats. So they sorted out the heap of bronzes, and while they kept some, the finest, doubtless, or those that bore inscriptions, they sold the rest to new generations of pilgrims, who, in their turn, offered them in due form. However frequently this was done, the influx was considerable, and they were forced to rid themselves quickly of the pieces that had at first been kept in reserve. They shut them up in cellars, or in pits dug expressly for them, veritable _favissæ_ similar to those of classical times;[93] they accumulated by thousands, large and small, in wood and in bronze, some intact and fresh as when just made, others already out of shape, rotten, oxidized and of no value. The places of concealment were soon forgotten, and the stuff in them reposed there beyond the reach of men until the day when the chances of excavation brought it to light.