For forty years in this wilderness had I been looking for them. Pictures of them by the score I had sought out, had seen them on walls and vases, graven on brass tablets, gems and marbles: yet none seen in real presence. Now in sober earnest they were laid before my eyes, given into my hands, perfect as when they were entombed to accompany that blessed lady to the nether world. Perfect did I say? Yes, but not complete. How fateful fortune does tantalize us,—clears up for us one mystery, and leaves another behind. They forgot the reed tongues in packing up for the journey, or perchance they deliberately withheld them. Ah! miserable that I am. Mr. Petrie tells me that he could find none, and he sifted all the dust of that dear lady, and nobody he avers had been there before him,—not for three thousand years. Think of it! A rock hewn sepulchre, in eternal night and silence since the days when Miriam sang her song of youth and triumph. Moreover, to my questionings, Mr. Petrie says that he does not believe that these flutes ever had any reeds to play them, but that they were blown at the end, and so whistled as one whistles a key. Then, to crown me with confusion, up rises another archæological investigator with eyes deeply scrutinizing, and he is certain that they were true lip blown flutes, and that no reed was ever employed. I looked with other eyes, and one glance told me that these pipes originally had reed tongues, reeds of the immemorial kind, and in use to the present day in the arghool. No, by Adonais, surely I cannot be deceived in this. Surely these are the _Gingroi_, the wailing flutes, associated with funeral ceremonies, slender pipes scarcely bigger than a ripened corn stalk. A fragment of such an one exists in the British Museum, which often excited my curiosity, but was in so delapidated a condition that nothing certain could be made of it. The discovery of this pair of flutes however made clear the relation though the British Museum possesses but a fragment, and treasures it. Curious is it not? A nation takes into its care a broken straw, because some human hand in the dim past has fashioned it to use and purpose, and the subtlety of life has not gone out of it yet.