Every winter then, for those three years, and indeed for one year more, tragic and final--I went across to Egypt from Greece, firm in the protection of the sunny gods when I started, and hastening to swing the incense again when I returned. And I must surely have been inoculated with the poison of the darker deities, so that for two years I was immune from their attacks, or perhaps Maggie’s excavations in the temple of Mut in Karnak were so thrilling and surprising that “the plague was stayed,” or perhaps I made some truce and reconciliation with the hawk-faced gods and the cats and the baboons, or perhaps (as seemed most probable of all) I had imagined a vain thing when for the first time I thought that the iron of these malignant conceptions had entered into my soul, for the early months of the new year in 1895 and 1896 were weeks of incessant exhilaration, the glory of which was this concession, given to Maggie by the Ministry of Antiquities, that she might conduct the excavation of a temple. Did ever an invalid plan and carry out so sumptuous an activity? She was wintering in Egypt for her health, being threatened with a crippling form of rheumatism; she was suffering also from an internal malady, depressing and deadly: a chill was a serious thing for her, fatigue must be avoided, and yet with the most glorious contempt of bodily ailments which I have ever seen, she continued to employ some amazing mental vitality that brushed disabilities aside, and, while it conformed to medical orders, crammed the minutes with such sowings and reapings as the most robust might envy. When I got to Egypt in the first of these three years she had already obtained permission to excavate the temple of Mut in the horse-shoe lake at Karnak, with the proviso that the museum at Gizeh was to claim anything it desired out of the finds; she had got together sufficient funds to conduct a six weeks’ exploration with a moderate staff of workers, and there she was with her fly-whisk and her white donkey, using a dozen words of Arabic to the workers with astonishing effect. She had begun by trenching the site diagonally in order to cut across any walls that were covered by the soil, and another diagonal soon gave the general plan of the unknown temple. All the local English archæologists were, so to speak, at her feet, partly from the entire novelty of an English girl conducting an excavation of her own, but more because of her grateful and enthusiastic personality, and M. Naville, who was engaged at Deir-el-Bahari across the river, came and sat like a benignant eagle on a corner stone, while Mr. Newberry deciphered some freshly exposed inscription. I was given a general supervision, with the object of discovering the most economical method of clearing, of arranging the “throws” of earth (so that those going to the chucking heap should not use the same path as those returning with empty baskets, a plan which entailed collisions and much pleasant