Sir Harry Johnston saw this kind of papyrus boat in Uganda, floating on a little lake in the forest, making so pretty a picture that he photographed it. Trees were hollowed by burning out the interior, long before tools had been devised, and the next suggested stage would be when young trees riven, yielded planks that could be bent into form for boat-building. Soon after he had attained this mastery we should find that the original cave-dweller became in course of time a boat dweller. Thus we imagine it happened that the earliest lyre took the form of a boat, or rather of a half-boat, the dwelling half, roofed or covered in, wherein the family lived mainly, as has been the immemorial custom in the great river regions—a custom existing even to this day. The skill acquired in developing the lines in boat-building was precisely the skill that was applied to equal advantage in lyre-building, and thus the sounds were housed. To understand aright the process of evolution I think it very desirable that the imagination should have free play, and take us into the scenery and into the time in which it was going on, and if we can, by any chance glow of fancy, get the very atmosphere about us. The earliest lyre of which we have any representation is the three-stringed lyre. Such a lyre is seen at page 13, the same as was slung on the mast of Queen Hatasu’s ship that she sent to the coast of Arabia. Next in advance is the four-stringed lyre of the same pattern. In the British Museum there are two ancient examples of these. (_Fig. 47_). They usefully make clear the construction. The upper figure shews the complete instrument; the lower figure shews the interior part of the construction, the skin or parchment covering of the top of the boat being absent. The framework was covered over with thin wood or with skin, lizard skin for choice. Some illustrations of examples of this kind of lyre show that the end of the bow where the pegs are inserted, was cut to receive the strings, exactly as in later ages in violins. [Illustration: _Fig. 47._] This summer at Burlington House, Mr. Garstang exhibited a five-stringed lyre of this pattern which in his exploration he had recovered from one of the tombs at Beni-Hassan, which had not been in daylight for more than three thousand years. The strings naturally had perished long ago. In the earliest times after the Egyptians had begun to depict the incidents of their daily life, and to make record of their nation’s history on the walls of tombs and temples, we find three distinct types of musical stringed instruments possessed by them; sometimes the representations of these are given in relief carved in stone, sometimes incised only and painted. Not decoration but history their minds were set upon; each man who had power held his own individual history to be of supreme importance, and thus there has been left to us a picture book of priceless veracity.