For some time after she laid her head on her pillow, she racked her brain for an explanation of the singular sensation she had experienced, and at last, annoyed by her restlessness and silly superstition, she was just sinking into dreams of Ammon and Serapis, when the fierce barking of Ali caused her to start up in terror. The dog seemed almost wild, running frantically to and fro, howling and whining; but finally the sounds receded, gradually quiet was restored, and Edna fell asleep soon after the scream of the locomotive and the rumble of the cars told her that the four o'clock train had just started to Chattanooga.
Modern zoologic science explodes the popular fallacy that chameleons assume, and reflect at will, the color of the substance on which they rest or feed; but, with a profound salaam to savants, it is respectfully submitted that the mental saurian--human thought-- certainly takes its changing hues, day by day, from the books through which it crawls devouringly.
Is there not ground for plausible doubt that, if the work-bench of Mezzofanti had not stood just beneath the teacher's window, whence the ears of the young carpenter were regaled from morning till night with the rudiments of Latin and Greek, he would never have forsworn planing for parsing, mastered forty dialects, proved a walking scarlet-capped polygot, and attained the distinction of an honorary nomination for the office of interpreter-general at the Tower of Babel?
The hoary associations and typical significance of the numerous relics that crowded Mr. Murray's rooms seized upon Edna's fancy, linked her sympathies with the huge pantheistic systems of the Orient, and filled her mind with waifs from the dusky realm of a mythology that seemed to antedate all the authentic chronological computations of man. To the East, the mighty alma mater of the human races--of letters, religions, arts, and politics, her thoughts wandered in wondering awe; and Belzoni, Burckhardt, Layard, and Champollion were hierophants of whose teachings she never wearied. As day by day she yielded more and more to this fascinating nepenthe influence, and bent over the granite sarcophagus in one corner of Mr. Murray's museum, where lay a shrunken mummy shrouded in gilded byssus, the wish strengthened to understand the symbols in which subtle Egyptian priests masked their theogony.
While morning and afternoon hours were given to those branches of study in which Mr. Hammond guided her, she generally spent the evening in Mr. Murray's sitting-room, and sometimes the clock in the rotunda struck midnight before she locked up the MSS. and illuminated papyri.
Two nights after the examination of the Targum, she was seated near the book-case looking over the plates in that rare but very valuable volume, Spence's Polymetis, when the idea flashed across her mind that a rigid analysis and comparison of all the mythologies of the world would throw some light on the problem of ethnology, and in conjunction with philology settle the vexed question.