ONE of the lesson books Lizzie dearly loved to study was one that some of my girl friends are in the habit of calling “rather dull." Of course, those only of us who live in or pay holiday visits to friends in London can say that we have really seen for ourselves the strange carving and picture writing with which the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum are filled. But Elsie, who writes to me from a fishing village in Scotland, and Sybil, who lives in one of the prettiest of our east coast watering places, are saying they have not had an opportunity of going to the Museum, but would like to hear about Lizzie's visits.
I will try and tell them just a few of the things that she found most interesting.
I must not forget to tell you that Lizzie's father was a great admirer of old buildings, old pictures and old books: so it was perhaps from him that the little girl learned to feel herself at home among so many strange and new objects.
One set of glass cases she never seemed to get tired of peeping into were filled with very old lamps, vases, plates and many other things which Lizzie was told by her father had been really used by people who lived in Egypt more than three thousand years ago. One case was filled with children's toys, and Lizzie liked to look at these and think of the little children who had owned them and wonder what kind of games they played at.
“Can I tell you anything about the contents of that case?" Dolly is asking.
Yes, for I too have seen it, though such a long time ago that I am afraid I quite forget the names of some of the toys.
“Were there any dolls for the little girls?" Millie (who has quite a large family of wax and china babies) is asking. Yes, Millie, there were several, not quite like those you play with. Dolls in Egypt seem to have been carved out of one piece of wood. They must have taken a long time to carve, as many of them are very nicely done and show that great care was taken in forming the joints.
We have read in our Bibles about the chariots of Egypt, and know they were a kind of carriage in which kings and governors used to ride. Chariots, made of a strong kind of china or terra cotta clay, were favorite toys with the children of Egypt, and one with both its wheels broken made me think of the contents of some of the play rooms I get a peep into now and then.
But I must not write any more about toys, for I want very much to tell you about some curious bricks that some Bible readers I know, have visited the British Museum on purpose to look at. They are said to have been made by the Jews, or, as they are often called, the Children of Israel, when they were slaves in the land of Egypt. These bricks are made of clay that, after having been mixed with chopped straw, was worked into a paste and baked in the heat of the sun. Some of these bricks are broken, so that it is easy to see the straw. We might wonder why some of the bricks contain so much, others so little, straw. But our Bibles will answer the question that Percy was, I think, going to ask.
We have only to open our Bibles at the fifth chapter of Exodus and read from the tenth verse to the end of the chapter, and we shall know the whole story in the very words of Scripture. How the darkest, saddest time for God's people in the land over which the proud king Pharaoh ruled came just before they quitted it forever. Truly, a night of weeping followed by a morning of joy.
Lizzie was only a little girl at the time of which I am telling you, so it would have been, too much to expect her to think of or understand all she saw in the Museum, but on every visit she was learning, so we may be forgiven for calling old stories one of her lesson books, and the lessons they taught helped, I believe, in after years to make her the thoughtful, intelligent Bible reader she was.
Sometimes she was allowed to accompany her father on his visits to the Library of the Museum, and while he sat reading some volume of history or travel, Lizzie would steal away on tiptoe to peep into a case of curious old Bibles. Few, if any, of them were printed, for they belonged to a time when the art of printing was unknown in England.
They had been written in Latin, and though Lizzie could not read a word of that language, she liked to look at what her father told her were called MS. Bibles, for in some of them all the capital letters were brightly painted in red, blue and gold, while others had pictures of flowers and baby faces that seemed almost to smile at her from among the scrolls of the border.