He took an interest in those who waited on him, allowed them certain breaches of etiquette when he was pleased with them, and was indulgent to their little failings. If they had just returned from foreign lands, a little countrified after a lengthy exile from the court, he would break out into pleasantries over their embarrassment and their unfashionable costume,--kingly pleasantries which excited the forced mirth of the bystanders, but which soon fell flat and had no meaning for those outside the palace. The Pharaoh was fond of laughing and drinking; indeed, if we may believe evil tongues, he took so much at times as to incapacitate him for business. The chase was not always a pleasure to him, hunting in the desert, at least, where the lions evinced a provoking tendency to show as little respect for the divinity of the prince as for his mortal subjects; but, like the chiefs of old, he felt it a duty to his people to destroy wild beasts, and he ended by counting the slain in hundreds, however short his reign might be.* *Amenôthes III. had killed as many as a hundred and two lions during the first ten years of his reign. A considerable part of his time was taken up in war--in the east, against the Libyans in the regions of the Oasis; in the Nile Valley to the south of Aswan against the Nubians; on the Isthmus of Suez and in the Sinaitic Peninsula against the Bedouin; frequently also in a civil war against some ambitious noble or some turbulent member of his own family. He travelled frequently from south to north, and from north to south, leaving in every possible place marked traces of his visits--on the rocks of Elephantine and of the first cataract, on those of Silsilis or of El-Kab, and he appeared to his vassals as Tûmû himself arisen among them to repress injustice and disorder. He restored or enlarged the monuments, regulated equitably the assessment of taxes and charges, settled or dismissed the lawsuits between one town and another concerning the appropriation of the water, or the possession of certain territories, distributed fiefs which had fallen vacant, among his faithful servants, and granted pensions to be paid out of the royal revenues.* * These details are not found on the historical monuments, but are furnished to us by the description given in “The Book of Knowledge of what there is in the other world” of the course of the sun across the domain of the hours of night; the god is there described as a Pharaoh passing through his kingdom, and all that he does for his vassals, the dead, is identical with what Pharaoh was accustomed to do for his subjects, the living.