Time has crumbled many a granite monument erected to the memory of monarchs of early Egyptian dynasties, but a tiny scent-bottle of yellow glass, with the name Amenophis worked upon it in blue, has come down to us from the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. King Amenophis little guessed that his fragile gift at life’s parting from his Queen Thi would survive the vicissitudes of the unguessed ages that have treated the pedestal of his Colossus at Thebes with such scant courtesy. Yet here we may hold it in the palm of a hand, a lovely trinket whose fragility has defied the boast of bronze or the strength of stone! As Pliny says, it is no easy matter to give novelty to old subjects, authority to new, to impart lustre to rusty things, light to the obscure and mysterious. Yet he who writes of antiques and curios may find the subject of old glass so wide a field in which to browse that its restraints seem few indeed and its interest of broad appeal. The millefiori glass of yesterday and to-day offers to the collector a fascinating study. It is the “Glass of a Thousand Flowers,” a pretty name the Italians gave it centuries ago--_mille_, a thousand, and _fiori_, flowers. Don’t you remember when you were little, very little, the round, heavy glass paper-weights into which you could look like a crystal-gazer and find mysteriously embedded flower-like forms of colored glass? How you puzzled grandfather’s head, too, when you asked him questions about it. These old millefiori paper-weights--long out of fashion, alas!--were bought on faith as curiosities, and only the sophisticated age that decreed such marvels unfitting the dignity of maturity relegated them to hiding-places now for the most part forgotten. The wonderful striated marbles, the attractive “glassies” of our own Golden Age, maintained with us the tradition of attachment; and now we have once more begun to display the paper-weights of the Thousand Flowers, and antiquarians are doing such brisk business in them that manufacturers are almost encouraged to place on the market again these interesting objects of millefiori glass.