“I was a wealthy young Spartan and loved a Spartan girl, Thelxinoe. She returned my love and presently we had, no one knowing it, our heart’s desire. But my darling’s parents proposed to marry her to another Spartan. So we fled secretly together and Sparta pronounced sentence of death on us both. We managed to travel to Sicily. Here we lived in dire poverty, but in our happiness we forgot all else because we were together. Soon my dear died, but her body was not buried. I have her with me and I love her always and I am with her.” After these words he led Habrocomes into an inner room and showed him the mummy that had been Thelxinoe. She was old now, but she appeared beautiful to her husband. “To her,” said he, “I always talk as if she were alive. I sleep here with her; I eat near her. If I come back tired from my fishing, the sight of her comforts me. For I do not see her as you do, my son. I see her as she was in Lacedemon, as she was when we fled. I see the night of our first love. I see our flight together.” The young Greek exclaims: “O my own dearest love, shall I ever find you even dead? Here to Aegialeus the body of Thelxinoe is the great comfort of his life. Now I have learned that age sets no bounds to true love.” This story of the second or third century A.D. might seem too macabre to be possible if the _New York Times_ of Nov. 12, 1940 had not recorded such a case at Key West, Florida. Karl Tanzler van Cosel, aged X-ray technician, had removed the body of Elena Hoyas Mesa from its crypt and had kept it in his bed-room for seven years. He said he had hoped to restore it to life. Perhaps Xenophon of Ephesus who wrote this story of Aegialeus and his mummy had heard some such “true story” which he embodied in his novel. In any case, he has given us here an illustration of how the theme “true love is eternal” may be pictured in a realistic romance. Think how dramatic this scene would be in a movie: the small inner bed-room of the fisherman’s hut suddenly lighted; the old man getting his young friend to help him remove the front of the coffin, then looking rapturously at the mummy inside and reaffirming before it his life-long love. That is my illustration of the heart of a realistic Greek romance.