remark which Sir Peter Teazle makes in the last act of the 'School for Scandal.'"
"What pregnant remark?"
"'It's a damned wicked world, Sir Oliver, and the fewer people we praise the better.' I advise you to exercise a certain caution in extolling the honesty and piety of the early Egyptians or, at any rate, in congratulating them on their universal innocence of the crime of tomb-robbing."
"You don't mean to say that this particular form of sacrilegious burglary is an ancient———"
"Only just upon three thousand years old. The earliest recorded case was about 1100 B.C."
"Recorded?"
"Yes, to be sure. Ask some Egyptologist to give you a translation of the passages about it in the Abbott and Amherst papyri. You will find enough there to convince you that the early Egyptians knew a thing or two about mummy-snatching, and that
