greater security, the cemeteries were private and official documents containing hidden far back in the hills. At Oxyrhynchus there were no hills nearer than seven miles, and the intervening ground is a flat plain with scarcely a rise. In this plain, however, and parallel with the town, at a distance of a quarter of a mile to a mile from the ruins, we found many tombs, chiefly of the second to the fourth century. As is the case with so many Egyptian cemeteries, most of the tombs which were worth plundering had been opened long ago; and those which had not been disturbed contained little of interest, especially as they had been dug in low ground and were affected by damp working up through the soil, so that any papyrus which might have been buried there would have perished long ago. So, after three uneventful weeks, we resolved to start work upon the town. On January 11th we sallied forth at sunrise with some seventy workmen and boys, and set them to dig trenches through a mound near a large space covered with piles of limestone chips, which probably denotes the site of an ancient temple, though its walls have been all but entirely dug out for the sake of the stone. The choice proved a very fortunate one, for papyrus scraps at once began to come to light in considerable quantities, varied by occasional complete or nearly complete letters, contracts, accounts, and so on; and there were also a number of fragments written in uncials, or rounded capital letters, the form of writing used in copying classical or theological manuscripts. Later in the week Mr. Hunt, in sorting the papyri found on the second day, noticed on a crumpled uncial fragment written on both sides the Greek word KAPPOZ ("mote"), which at once suggested to him the verse in the Gospels concerning the mote and the beam. A further examination showed that the passage in the papyrus really was the conclusion of the verse, Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye;" but that the rest of the papyrus differed considerably from the Gospels, and was, in fact, a leaf of a book containing a collection of sayings of Christ, some of which, apparently, were new. 66 More than that could not be determined until we came back to England. The following day Mr. Hunt identified. another fragment as containing most of the first chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel. The evidence both of the handwriting and of the dated papyri with which they were found makes it certain that both the "Logia" and the St. Matthew fragment were written not later than the third cen even private persons used to send letters, contracts, and other documents which they wished to keep, just as we send similar documents to a solicitor or banker. Of course, after a time, when the records tury, and they are, therefore, a century older than the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. It is not improbable that they were the sole remains of a library belonging to some Christian who perished in the persecution during Diocletian's were no longer wanted, a clearance bereign, and whose books were thrown away. Finding that the rubbish mounds were so fruitful, I proceeded to increase the number of workmen and boys up to 110, and the flow of papyri rapidly became a torrent which it was difficult to cope with. Each lot found by a pair (man and boy working together) had to be kept separate from the rest; for the knowledge which papyri are found together is frequently of great importance, as, for instance, in determining the date of the "Logia;" and since it is inevitable that some papyri should get broken in the process of getting them out of the closely packed soil, it is imperative to keep together, as far as possible, fragments of the same document. We engaged two men to make tin boxes for storing the papyri, but for the next ten weeks they could scarcely keep up with us. The papyri were, as a rule, not very far from the surface of the rubbish; in one patch of ground, indeed, merely turning up the surface with one's boot would sometimes disclose a roll; and it was seldom that we found them at a greater depth than ten feet, though we made various efforts by digging deep, especially in the earlier mounds, to find papyri earlier than the first century A.D. But our attempts were not successful, and the explanation seems to be that, as in the case of the tombs, the damp soaking from below had proved fatal to what papyri there may have been in the lower levels. It was not uncommon to find at a much less distance than ten feet from the surface, in the lower mounds, rolls which had been hopelessly spoiled by damp. Sometimes the papyri were scattered at various depths all over a mound, but generally they were confined to one or two layers of the rubbish, those in each layer having been thrown away about the same time. This was particularly the case in three mounds where large quantities of rolls were found together, probably representing part of the local archives or record offices at different periods. It was the custom in Egypt during the Roman period to carefully store up, in the government record offices at each town, official documents of every kind dealing with the administration and taxation of the country; and to these archives came necessary, and it seems that the old papyrus rolls were put in baskets or on wicker trays, and thrown away as rubbish. We on several occasions came upon places where a basketful of papyri had been thrown, and sometimes we even found them in the actual baskets. Unfortunately, it was the practice to tear most of the rolls to pieces first, and of the rest many had naturally been broken or crushed after being thrown away, while in some cases the rubbish mounds had been partially burnt; so that the amount discovered which is sufficiently well preserved to be of use bears but a small proportion to what the whole amount might have been. Still. even as it is, the number of fairly wellpreserved documents in these three great finds is very large, especially in the case of the third, which took place on March 18th and 19th, and was, I suppose, a “record" in point of quantity. On the first of these two days we came upon a part of a mound which had a thick layer of almost solid papyrus. There was room for six pairs of men and boys to be working simultaneously at this storehouse, and the difficulty was to find enough baskets in Behnesa to contain all the papyri. At the end of the day's work, no less than thirtysix were brought in, many of them stuffed with fine rolls, three to ten feet long. Fortunately, we had some large packing-cases at hand, in which we had brought our stores from Cairo, and as the baskets were required for the next day's work, Mr. Hunt and I set to work at nine o'clock in the evening to stow away the papyri. The task was only finished at three in the morning; and on the following night we had a repetition of it, for twenty-five more baskets were filled before the place was exhausted. This was our last great find, as the best ground had now all been dug; but we continued the excavations for nearly a month longer, at the end of which we packed up the papyri in twenty-five large cases, weighing altogether nearly two tons, and despatched them to Cairo. One hundred and fifty of the largest and finest rolls were taken for the Gizeh Museum; the rest is now at Oxford, where Mr. Hunt and I are engaged in the lengthy task of sorting and unrolling. The thorough examination of this vast collection will be the work of years, and it is impossible yet to say what may be discovered in it. Our diggers, with the exception of four trained men from the Fayûm, who had fied with the bakhshish which they received for all that they found. The idea of the natives with regard to the motive of the excavators is that they are in search of gold, or at least of ancient coins. That EXACT FACSIMILE OF THE RECTO SIDE OF THE PAPYRUS. experience of digging for papyri and kept a general lookout over the others, were drawn from Behnesa and the surrounding villages. The site of Oxyrhynchus had been very little touched by antiquityhunters, and we were fortunate therefore in obtaining a very unsophisticated body of men, who knew nothing about anticas, to start with, and appeared very well satis there should be any interest attaching to "old paper" is, of course, quite beyond their comprehension; and, though ready enough to make a profit out of our apparent folly, they no doubt regarded our desire for papyri as a proof of that madness which is generally attributed to Europeans by the fellaheen second only to that afforded by our taking the skulls found in the ancient cemetery back to England in order to measure them. An amusing illustration of the fellaheen's speculations on the latter subject was given us two years ago at Nagada, whence Professor Petrie took back to England all the skeletons found in the socalled "New Race" cemetery. The current explanation, we found afterwards, of our proceedings was that in England there was a great paucity of population, and that in consequence we came out to Egypt to dig up skeletons, in order that by means of magic we might bring them back to life, and so make new men out of them. The excavator in Egypt is not much troubled by the restrictions which hamper the independence of employers of labor in this country. There is no question there about an eight-hours day. Sunrise to sunset, with an hour off at noon, makes a nine to eleven-hours day even for the youngest, and one does not hear much about "halftimers." As the papyrus digging was comparatively light work, I had more boys of course, another side to it, which is, in than men diggers, the former being not only easier to manage and more trustworthy, but quite as keen about the work as the men, which is rather remarkable, seeing that all their earnings go to their parents. But I should think nearly every boy in the district who could walk wanted to be taken on to the work. Some of the tiny applicants really looked as though they had only recently left their cradles, if they had ever known such luxuries, which, of course, they had not. One of the smartest workers of all was also the smallest, a little chap about eight years old, who had a wonderful eye for the right kind of soil for finding papyri. I am afraid some tender-hearted persons would have thought me a very brutal taskmaster, if they could have seen some of these children lifting and carrying away heavy baskets of rubbish all day, clothed, perhaps, if the weather was hot, in nothing but a cap on their heads and a piece of string round their waists. But I think the same persons would have retracted their opinion, if they could, at the end of the day's work, have seen the said infants racing each other home over the sand dunes, while I plowed my way painfully in the reality, much the more prominent of the two. There are many more blanks than prizes drawn in this, perhaps the most le- . gitimate, form of lottery, though the world. does not hear much of the first. And even when Fortune is, on the whole, kind, she generally bestows her gifts at rare intervals, in the hope of which the excavator has to bear weeks and often months of monotony. Moreover, superintending excavations in Egypt means standing all day to be half choked and blinded by the peculiarly pungent dust of ancient rubbish, blended on most days with the not less irritating sand of the desert; probably drinking water which not even the East London Waterworks would have ventured to supply to its consumers, and keeping incessant watch over men who, however much you may flatter yourself to the contrary, will steal if they get the chance and think it worth their while to do so. rear. People naturally think of excavating as a continuous process of looking on at the discovery of valuable things; but there is, Still the excavator's life has a fascination possessed by few other pursuits; and though at present the task of publishing the papyri which we have found is more pressing than that of discovering new ones, I look forward to the day, not very distant, I hope, when I shall once more exchange the pen for the measuring stick, and the close atmosphere of the study for the freedom and independence of the desert. WHAT A SERVICE OF SEVEN MONTHS DID FOR A TROOP OF RAW VOLUNTEERS. BY IRA SEYMOUR. THE process by which men were made soldiers in our late war was one of the most remarkable things in that phenomenal conflict. Men who had no taste for military life, no desire for martial glory, and none save the most rudimentary military training were enlisted, uniformed, organized into regiments, officered often with those as ignorant of war as themselves, equipped, armed, and sent into the field within a few months, or even a few weeks, after being mustered into service. And these raw regiments were speedily molded into well-disciplined and effective battalions, fit to be members of a famous army. All this is history more or less well known, but the way in which the result was accomplished is not so familiar, and perhaps the experience of one who was a member of one of these regiments may be worth telling. 64 I remember I was but a boy then-how, at the time of the news from Sumter and the President's first call for troops, the pastor of the village church spoke on a Sunday morning to a breathless congregation and closed with the trumpet call, Who will go to the war?" Instantly in the gallery one man stood up. He was a veteran who had served in the regular army in Mexico. There were others, but I mention him because he was typical. Into the earliest formed regiments went the few like the soldier of Mexico who had seen actual warfare, also the pick of the members of the city militia organizations; and into these first regiments went the enthusiasm of the nation's first burst of patriotism. Then, too, the delays of the first year of the war gave opportunity for drill and discipline of the regulation sort, often under officers of West Point training. These oldest regiments were, therefore, the flower of the army, and in a peculiar way the model and foundation of it. But after Gettysburg-indeed, before that memorable battle-they had become terribly reduced in number and actually formed but a fraction of the mighty host. THE ENLISTMENT. The history of the later regiments was different. Enthusiasm, though it did not die, cooled. Something else took its place, something more truly characteristic of the great crisis. I do not know how to give it a name. It was a spirit that entered into the nation, a solemn and compelling impulse that seized upon men whether they would or no. Many attempted to resist, but successful resistance was blasting to peace of mind. The voice of this spirit asked insistently, "Why do you not go to the war?" And it was not easy for an able-bodied man to prove his right to stay at home. It was in obedience to this impulse that men went into regiments formed during the year of 1862. The day for illusions was passing; the grim character of the |