After the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt many of the royal tombs were pillaged, and the priests removed the royal mummies to safer places in the hills near Thebes. The places have now been discovered, and the mummies have been removed to the museum at Cairo. Maspero was supervising one of these removals, with a gang of natives to do the work. The mummies were brought out one by one, and laid down in the shade below a ledge of rock. In the heat of the day the natives rested, and he went on working at his notes. Suddenly he heard a fearful shriek; and, looking up, saw one of the natives pointing at a mummy--the mummy was slowly raising itself with the gesture that Orientals use in uttering a solemn curse. All the natives fled, and he was left alone to face the mummies; but he soon saw what was happening. This mummy was no longer in the shade, as the sun was coming round the ledge of rock; and the heat was causing a contraction of some glutinous substance in the mummy, and thus producing this movement.--He told me this himself at his house in Paris on 25 March 1896. I also heard in Paris a story of Colonel Picquart, the amateur detective in the Dreyfus case. I heard it from a man who knew him well.--Picquart took nothing on trust: always looked into everything himself. As there was some talk in Paris of spirit-rapping, table-turning, and such things, he went to a séance to see what he could make of it. He suspected some trickery about a hat that they were using, and made them use his own. “And they not only caused my hat to rotate upon the table, but they imparted to it such an impetus of rotation, that it continued to rotate upon my head all the while that I was walking home.” An old Oxford don once went with me from Athens to Sunium, 2 April 1888, and others laughed irreverently at some notes he made there:--“view from temple: saw several islands: had lunch: saw more islands.” It was also after lunch that a painter, whom I knew, mistook an only child for twins. But at Sunium it was not the luncheon--only the lifting of a haze upon the sea. Though I have been in places, such as Chios and Messina, where there were earthquakes a little while before or after, I have never felt an earthquake in any place but London, 22 April 1884. It was in the morning, and I was going to take a coat down from a rack on which four coats were hanging, when I saw them swing like pendulums, and heard a bell ring. I knew what it was; but, when I asked other people if they had felt the earthquake, they were so impolitely incredulous that I felt embarrassed. I did not recover my character until the afternoon, when the papers issued their sensational posters. * * * * *