"Oh yes, I was a great king, of course, and the greatest warrior the world has ever seen; but my path was not all roses. My wife--my household collection--wanted their statues placed by the side of mine. Individually! Think of what a figure I would have cut! It was a silly notion. What had they done to deserve statues? I did it, though--that is collectively--here and there. I embodied her in a single figure at my knee, as became her position. But she wasn't satisfied--collectively and individually she declared she amounted to as much as I did, and pointed at our seventy-two sons. "No, I was never understood by that lot. I was never a hero in my own house. So I had to order another statue, putting her at my side. You saw it down-stairs. It is very beautiful, of course, and is a good likeness of her, collectively. She always made a good composite picture, but is it fair to me? She was never regarded in that important way, except by herself. "Yes, it is very pleasant here--very indeed. The last time I was allowed to reincarnate, I was still in the cave at Der al-Bahari, where they stored us when Cambyses came along and raided Thebes. Cambyses burned a number of my temples. It was too bad. The cave was a poor place, but safe. My tomb was much pleasanter, though it was not as grand as I had intended it to be. I meant to have the finest tomb in the valley, but my contractor cheated me. "The men who furnished the materials paid him large sums and gave me very poor returns. His name was Baksheesh, which is how the word originated, though it means several things now, I believe." "How interesting!" I interrupted. "We would call that grafting in our country." "Very likely; I didn't find out that he was grafting, as you say, until quite late, then I put him into a block of concrete and built him into a temple. He made a very good block; he is there yet. After that there was no trouble for a while." "I saw something of the kind at Algiers--one Geronimo," I began-- "Later, three thousand years later. I originated the idea--it has been often adopted since. Those people along the Coast adopted a good many of my ideas, but they never get the value out of them. It put an end to baksheesh--graft as you call it--in Thebes, and it would be valuable to-day in Cairo, I should think. A wall around Cairo could be built in that way--there is enough material." The King rested a little on his other arm, then continued: