To gratify this collector’s hobby an informant turned up one day to report that near Thebes a splendid statue of heroic proportions had been discovered. It was said to be the effigy of a Rameses in all its impassive beauty. Having knowledge of the collector’s penchant the informant’s agent in Egypt had kept back the secret of the discovery. In this way the collector was given the first refusal, the statue was all ready to be shipped, the whole at the reasonable price of a hundred thousand francs. As usual the proposal was accompanied with convincing documents, stamped letters, descriptive memoranda and so forth. Within view of a long-desired ornament, the collector was easily induced to take part in the transaction to be carried on with the usual secrecy, upon the condition that the statue should be taken straight to his house on its arrival, and in such a way as to preclude all knowledge on the part of others. Anyone unacquainted with the psychology of collectors--something that never happens to fakers--might be inclined to imagine that the schemer would try to hasten the conclusion of the business so elaborately planned, for fear the buyer might change his mind or have his eyes opened in some way. But our man knew that the collector would speak to no one, lest he might lose the rare chance offered him, and also that the longer the delay, the more obstacles met with or surmounted, the keener would he become to possess the exceptional “find.” Finally, when the arrival of the statue was announced and it reached the Paris railway station in due time, the collector, suspicious and afraid like all true art lovers, insisted that it should be conveyed to his house by night. After so much picturesque mystery the _dénouement_ came, as usual, too late and in the most banal manner. The fraud was exposed on the very day of the exhibition, and the enraged collector started an energetic search for the culprits, but the birds had flown--he only found the empty cage, namely the atelier in a neighbouring street where his Rameses had been given birth. The debris of the would-be Oriental granite still strewed the floor. “_Sic transit_----” The faker and the forger are not prone to repentance. Vrain-Lucas, who had made himself notorious by cheating M. Chasles, had hardly regained his liberty after serving his term before he was again called to answer for another fraud. For a poor provincial priest he had falsified a whole genealogical tree. Paul Eudel relates of one Oriental faker who proved himself as impenitent as resourceful. Clever and gifted with the peculiar shrewdness of the Oriental, he made his first _coup_ by selling to the German Emperor some Moabite pottery which had certainly never been on the shores of the Jordan nor on the coast of the Dead Sea. This clever piece of trickery was recently discovered by the eminent Orientalist M. Clermont-Ganneau.