"He might do nothing from daylight till darkness. If he wished, the most famous lords, with their wives, sisters, and daughters, would serve food to him. He not only stretches forth his own hands to take food, but, to the torment of our noble youths, he washes himself, dresses himself, and his barber spends whole days in snaring birds and thus wastes his abilities. "O Rameses, Rameses!" sighed the exquisite. "Is it possible that fashion should be developed in the time of such a prince? We wear the same aprons from one year to another, and we retain wigs, only thanks to court dignitaries, for Rameses will not wear any wig. This is a great offence to the whole order of nobles. And all brought about by cursed politics, brr! Oh, how happy I am that I need not divine what they are thinking of in Tyre or Nineveh; break my head over wages for the army; calculate how many people have been added to Egypt or taken from it, and what rents must be collected. It is a terrible thing to say to one's self, 'My tenant does not pay what I need and expend, but what the increase of the Nile permits.'" Thus meditated the exquisite Tutmosis, while he strengthened his anxious soul with golden wine. Before the boat had sailed up to Memphis, heavy sleep had mastered him in such wise that his slaves had to carry their lord to the litter. After the departure of Tutmosis, which resembled a flight, the heir fell to thinking deeply; he even felt fear. Rameses was a sceptic. As a pupil of the priests, and a member of the highest aristocracy, he knew that when certain priests had fasted many months and mortified their senses they summoned spirits, while others spoke of spirits as a fancy, a deception. He had seen, too, that Apis, the sacred bull before which all Egypt fell prostrate, received at times heavy blows of a cane from inferior priests, who gave the beast food and brought cows to him. He understood, finally, that his father, Rameses XII., who for the common crowd was a god who lived through eternity, and the all-commanding lord of this world, was really just such a person as others, only a little more weakly than ordinary old men, and very much limited in power by the priestly order. The prince saw all this, and jeered in his soul and even in public at many things. But all his infidelity fell before the actual truth,--that no one was permitted to trifle with the titles of the pharaoh. Rameses knew the history of his country, and he remembered that in Egypt many things were forgiven the mighty. A great lord might ruin a canal, kill a man in secret, revile the gods privately, take presents from ambassadors of foreign states, but two sins were not forgiven,--the betrayal of priestly secrets, and treason to the pharaoh. A man who committed one or the other disappeared, sometimes after a year, from among his friends and servants. But where he had been put or what had been done with him, no one even dared to mention.