“Well, in the first place, that queen is entirely too modern, and she reigned something like three or four hundred years before the Christian era, while I came from the family of one of the first of the real Egyptian sovereigns. She was not even Egyptian, being only of Greek origin. We did not recognize her when she died and she was not even mummified, for the Romans would not have allowed it, and so no one ever knew what ever really became of her body. It did not interest us, as she was an upstart who had brought all sorts of evils upon my country. She is doubtless dust and ashes two thousand years ago. She was greatly overrated, and was nowhere near so beautiful as she has been considered. I belonged to the first dynasty, though there had been many kings and queens before me. My tomb was like those of the first royal ladies of my line. I had never been married—nor had I reigned, so according to usage, my tomb and sarcophagus were plain, save for the paintings on them to tell who I was. One day some vandals came and rifled my tomb and took my mummy case, and brought it to this country and put me in the museum in a glass case, and you have no idea how angry it makes me to have to squeeze out. May the jackals eat their bones, and leave no two of them together, so they will never find them in this world or the other and may wild beasts tear their children, and leave the mothers desolate, and raze their dwellings, and may their babes starve to death, and may they all die crying for water—” How much longer this would have continued the newspaper man did not know, but he began to feel most uncomfortable, for one of these very collectors of mummies was his own father, and if he had not brought his particular one he had brought two others. He began to want to go home, but he tried to look sympathetic, and as if he had never heard of such terrible things as stealing mummies before. She continued: “Yes; I am lady Shep, and when I was mummified these lines were put upon my case. Not everybody knows about them, but I will tell you. First, there was a line of text, and this is what it says: