But the excavators have their trials too. Sometimes a digger has been working for weeks at some deep burial pit. Suppose now that “something” has been found. Perhaps a door is about to be opened. At the critical moment, some tourists appear on the scene. The unearthing or opening must stop, for who knows what may be found, and the greatest care must be taken to get full notes and photographic records, that nothing may be lost. The afternoon passes, and night begins to come on. It is too late now to open the find, it must wait, strongly guarded from thieves, till to-morrow; and the excavator passes an uneasy night, pondering and wondering what he will find, and saying evil things about those who hindered him in his work. I have been in the habit of showing my forged antiquities to Egyptologists, not bumptiously, but humbly, and with a due knowledge of my own colossal ignorance. The specimen would be passed across the table in silence, accompanied by a magnifying glass. The expert would frown heavily, but the specimen and the glass would, in the end, prove irresistible. As I produced scarabs made more perfect, a certain uneasiness would be shown, and the question asked me, “Is this genuine or not?” To this I would never reply otherwise than to say, “I should be glad to have your opinion on the matter.” A very careful examination of the specimen would follow, and the reasons for considering it to be a forgery would be explained in terse plain language. There is a certain disadvantage in collecting spurious antiquities and getting expressions of opinion upon them; for after a time your association with these forgeries causes an inclination in the expert to condemn off-hand any specimen you may submit to him. To meet this occasionally I would hand over a genuine scarab, which would be detected, and inquiry made as to “what I was up to now, or whether I had really bought this as a fraudulent antiquity?” Occasionally remarks would be pointed, and expressed in the bluff way which “hides a heart of gold.” This I always accepted humbly, conscious of my own inferiority.