CHEOPS IN CONNEMARA 29 



extracts from Paradise Lost, from Pope's Essay on 

 Criticism, from Paley's Relation of Animated Bodies 

 to Inanimate Nature, from apparently most of the 

 recognised classics. Looking up from this at a somid 

 of bare feet on the boards, the visitor sees stationed 

 before the judicial window-seat a tattered and un- 

 kempt boy, who smiles and hangs down his head 

 with the most ingenuous shyness. 



" Martin Griffy, repeat the ' Address to a Mummy,' " 

 says the teacher in her carefully -repressed brogue; 

 and fixing his eyes upon his own muddy toes, 

 Martin Griffy forthwith embarks upon that poem, in 

 a voice pitched to the level of intoning and there 

 conscientiously sustained. 



Most people are familiar with Horace Smith's 

 kindly attempt to provide a mummy in Belzoni's 

 Exhibition with a history of its own; few, perhaps, 

 are favoured to hear it thus rendered, carefully, 

 correctly, but as in an unknown tongue, the guesses 

 of modern erudition coming in staccato sing-song 

 from the lips of a child who, it is most probable, has 

 never seen a town, knows of no fuel but that of his 

 native bogs, and only suspects that there is a com- 

 pleter kind of daily food than potatoes and tea. 

 Much less does he suspect the subtle and penetrating 

 pathos of his looks and his endeavour. Those who 

 have felt the anxiety and effort of a dog who walks 

 round a circus on his hind -legs, will know that it is 

 touching to see a mind obediently bent to the doing 

 of what is foreign to it. The poem progresses : 

 Cheops and Cephrenes, Cambyses and Osiris are got 

 over with occasional quaint ness of pronunciation, 

 and the auditor contrives to take a look at the glossary 

 at the end of the book to see what is said about these 

 names of antiquity. He finds there a great deal of 

 scholarly comment, as, for instance, " Thebes, an 



