“Oh, have you a family founder,
      On your ancestral tree,
     Who laid the corner-stone of Hope
      On the campus at Del-phee.”

“Better finish that up, and read it at the tea,” advised Anne; “there’s something so spirited about it.  Is Charity going to decorate the study for the festal occasion?  We ought to have something sort of different, don’t you think so?”

“Pioneer relics would be the only thing, and I don’t know where we’d scare those up.”

“There’s a whole cabinet of them in the Dean’s room at the Assembly Hall.”

The two girls looked at each other wisely.  The subject really needed no argument or discussion.  Kit said briefly: 

“I’ll try.  I think I can get some of them anyway if I approach Uncle Cassius as a humble student seeking knowledge.”

All unprepared for the onslaught, the Dean sat enjoying his after dinner smoke that evening when Kit tapped at the door.

“Come in,” he called, a little bit testily, looking over his eye-glasses at the intruder.  “I don’t think I can talk with you just now, my dear,” he said.  “I am very busy working out a dynasty problem.”

“Oh, but I’d love to help,” Kit pleaded, “and I did help before on the aborigines of Japan, didn’t I?  I even remember their names, the Ainos.”

“This is early Egyptian.  Something you know nothing whatever about.”

“Just mummies?” inquired Kit.  “Oh, Uncle Cassius, we girls back home made up a lovely little couplet about that when we were studying Egypt at high school.

    “’Heaven bless the royal mommies,
      And the jewels in their tummies.’”

No answering gleam of amusement showed in the Dean’s eyes.  In fact, be regarded her, Kit thought, rather severely for this unseemly display of levity.

“Of course,” she added, hastily, “that was when I was very much younger than I am now.  It was two years ago.”

The Dean coughed deprecatingly, and turned back to the pamphlets before him.

“Remains have been discovered,” he began in quite the tone he used in Assembly, “of the lost tribe of the Nemi.  When the Greeks, my dear, obtained a foothold in Carthage and along the Mediterranean coast, the Nemi remained unconquered and retreated to the mountain fastnesses, west of the source of the Nile.”

“Well, I know all about that,” Kit answered, encouragingly, perching herself on the arm of a chair, across from him.  “Just see,” and she counted off on her fingers, “Livingstone-Stanley,—­Victoria Falls—­Zambesi—­and Kipling wrote all about the people in ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy.’”

“No, no, no, not a bit like it!” the Dean exclaimed.  “My dear child, learn to think in centuries and epochs.  The long and short of it is, there have been some very wonderful remains of the Nemi recently discovered, and I have been honored by a commission from the Institute to write a complete summary of the results of the expedition and its historic significance.”