The most interesting objects in the museum, however, according to my way of thinking, are three or four sarcophagi, some of them dating back to seven hundred years before the Christian era, which have been brought here from the ancient tombs. Their immense significance to the student of history lies not so much in their great age, or in the tolerable state of preservation of the bodies which they contain, but rather in the recumbent figures of the dead which are carved upon the lids and which enable us to know how they looked in life. For, as careful comparison with the bodies has shown, they are unquestionably portraits of the deceased. One of them represents a priest of Eschmoun, a man with serene and dignified features, an abundance of curling hair, luxuriant mustaches and beard. So benign is his expression that it is difficult to conceive of him as having laid the quivering bodies of little children on the brazen, white-hot arms of Baal. Another, judging by the richness of the dress and the extreme refinement of the features, is evidently that of a lady of the aristocracy, her hair combed back from her brow and braided into two long plaits which fall down to frame her face, her slender figure clad in a girdled robe of some soft, diaphanous material which sweeps down in stately lines to her little sandaled feet, half concealing, half revealing, her exquisitely proportioned figure. A third, which has been identified as that of a priestess of Tanith and is the finest of all, shows a grandly modeled woman in the prime of life clad in a semi-transparent garment of rose-color. In one hand she holds a dove, in the other a bowl of offerings; the Egyptian head-dress which enframes her graciously beautiful face is surmounted by a vulture, the symbol of Isis. They must have been, on the whole, a fine-looking race, these people of Punic Carthage, the innate dignity which stamps their faces causing one to overlook the over-prominent Semitic noses and the sensual Eastern lips. Throughout our visit to Carthage we had been pestered almost beyond endurance by a horde of Arab ragamuffins who clamorously besought us to purchase coins of bronze and silver of whose authenticity I was more than a little doubtful, but which they claimed to have picked up on the site. One of these importunate youngsters, bolder than his fellows, followed us into the museum garden. I was about to purchase his wares in order to get rid of him when Father Delattre intervened. “Would you care,” he asked, “to have a genuine Carthaginian coin?”