They next sang the hundred and sixth Psalm, which describes the journey, the wilderness, and the disobedience of Israel. “It is well,” said Elisama, when they had done, “that our Greek is not here, or his nascent reverence for our people might be stopped in its growth. I must confess his society was at first very burthensome to me, but he is more open to the reception of the truth than I had given him credit for being, and I have hopes that he may become a stranger of the gate.” Myron returned full of admiration of the precious works of art which he had found in the temple of the Casian Jupiter, in which however, as a connoisseur, he found of course something to blame. At the meal the discourse of Helon and Myron (for Elisama was too oriental in his habits to talk at such a time) turned upon the ancient Goshen, in whose limits they now supposed themselves to be. They agreed that at the distance of fourteen hundred years it was very difficult to identify it, but that probably it was the district of Lower Egypt which is bounded by the sea, by the eastern branch of the Nile at Pelusium and by the river of Egypt, and that it perhaps ascended as far as Heliopolis to the south. When they awoke towards evening, refreshed by their sleep, the conversation respecting Goshen was resumed. Elisama, seated upon his carpet, thus took up the discourse: “It seems then that we are at least on the skirts of that fruitful district of pasturage, in which the children of Abraham sojourned, and where they grew from a family to a people. Thou hast already heard, Myron, that our father Jacob came down to Egypt, with seventy persons, to his son Joseph, who had preserved the land of Pharaoh, by his wise precautions, from the miseries of famine; that two hundred and fifteen years after Jacob went down into Egypt, and four hundred and thirty years after Abraham left his native country at God’s command, 603,550 fighting men of the Israelites quitted Egypt, without reckoning the 22,000 Levites, or the women and children. During these four hundred and thirty years Israel grew into a nation.