It is not unusual in Egypt to find that the worship of a Coptic or Mussulman saint has been substituted for that of an ancient Egyptian god. At the head of the Nubian highroad at Aswân the shrine of the ancient gods has been made the site of a mediæval shêkh’s tomb; and those who now go there to make their prayers before and after a journey are but carrying on a custom as old as history. Amongst the ruins of Thebes there is a hill up which barren women and as yet childless brides climb at dead of night to lay their supplications before the shêkh whose tomb is there erected. They do not know that their ancestors climbed the same hill in the days of the Pharaohs to offer the same petitions to Meritseger, the serpent goddess who had dwelt thereon since the beginning of things. And so in this valley I feel sure that the Coptic hermit who resided here was of no great consequence as judged upon his own merits, as indeed the fact that he is now forgotten indicates, but that the inhabitants of Akhmîm, accustomed in the pagan days of Panopolis to regard this place as holy ground, came gradually to ascribe to him the origin of its sanctity and to forget that in reality its sacredness dated from those days when Pan admired himself in the reedy pool and danced upon the rounded rocks. _Sic transit gloria divini!_ The modern name of the place, Bir el Ain, is the Arabic for “The Well of the Well-spring”--a somewhat uncomfortable sounding title, I am told, to native ears; and I am inclined to think that _ain_ is derived from the ancient Egyptian word of probably similar sound, meaning “a religious festival.” The place might in that case be so called because it was the well to which the yearly processional festival of Pan made its journey. We know that the image of the god Amen was conducted in this manner round the deserts over against Thebes, in a festival which, Professor Sethe thinks, may have given its name to the famous Wady Ain whither there is some reason to suppose that the procession made its way. It does not require an undue stretch of the imagination, therefore, to suppose that a similar religious ceremony was performed over against Panopolis. However, be this as it may, no one who has visited this pool, and who has sat at its edge in the cool of the twilight, will deny that Pan might be expected to have made an appearance here in the days of his power.