When he who had complained of the damage done the prince's property did not appear, though summoned in the hall of the court and on the market-place, the case was dropped, and the rest of the accused were set at liberty. One of the judges remarked, it is true, that according to law the prince's overseer should be prosecuted for false complaint, and, in case of conviction, suffer the punishment which threatened the defendants. This question too they passed over in silence. The overseer disappeared from the eyes of justice, he was sent by the heir to the province of Takens, and soon the whole box of documents in the case vanished it was unknown whither. On hearing this, Prince Rameses went to the grand secretary and asked with a smile,-- "Well, worthy lord, the innocent are liberated, the documents concerning them have been destroyed sacrilegiously, and still the dignity of the government has not been exposed to danger." "My prince," answered the grand secretary, with his usual coolness, "I did not understand that thou offerest complaints with one hand and wishest to withdraw them with the other. Worthiness, thou wert offended by the rabble; hence it was thy affair to punish it. If thou hast forgiven it, the state has nothing to answer." "The state!--the state!" repeated the prince. "We are the state," added he, blinking. "Yes, the state is the pharaoh and--his most faithful servants," added the secretary. This conversation with such a high official sufficed to obliterate in the prince's soul those ideas of state dignity which were growing and powerful, though indistinct yet. "The state, then, is not that immovable, ancient edifice to which each pharaoh is bound to add one stone of glory, but rather a sand-heap, which each ruler reshapes as he pleases. In the state there are no narrow doors, known as laws, in passing through which each must bow his head, whoever he be, erpatr or earth-worker. In this edifice are various entrances and exits, narrow for the weak and small, very wide, nay, commodious for the powerful." "If this be so," thought the prince, as the idea flashed on him, "I will make the order which shall please me." At that moment Rameses remembered two people,--the liberated black who without waiting for command had been ready to die for him, and that unknown priest. "If I had more like them, my will would have meaning in Egypt and beyond it," said he to himself, and he felt an inextinguishable desire to find that priest. "He is, in all likelihood, the man who restrained the crowd from attacking my house. On the one hand he knows law to perfection, on the other he knows how to manage multitudes." "A man beyond price! I must have him." From that time Rameses, in a small boat managed by one oarsman, began to visit the cottages in the neighborhood of his villa. Dressed in a tunic and a great wig, in his hand a staff on which a measure was cut out, the prince looked like an engineer studying the Nile and its overflows.