"Sayest thou?" quickly demanded the prince, surveying my face with his full bright gaze. "Thou art in advance of the rest of mankind, my Sesostris! The same feeling exists in my own bosom; but I believed myself alone in experiencing it. Some day we will hold discourse together on this high mystery. There seems to come up from my childhood a voice which I can never silence, and which I hear loudest when I am most solemnly engaged in the sacred rites of the altars of our gods, saying-- "'Son of earth, there is but one GOD, invisible, eternal, uncreated, and whose glory He will not share with another; worship Him with the spirit and with the understanding.'" "This is remarkable," I said, "for such also is the mystery taught by the priests of Chaldea, of whom Melchisedec was the first high-priest. I have read their sacred books in Damascus." "I have never seen them; yet this voice forces itself upon me everywhere, my Sesostris. All is dark and inscrutable to us mortals. We hang our faith upon a tradition, and our hopes upon a myth. We feel ourselves equal or superior to the deities we worship, and find no repose in the observances our religion demands. Would that I had the power to penetrate the blue heavens above us and find out God, and know what life means, and whence we came and whither we go." "Once across the Lake of the Dead," I answered, "and all will be revealed. Osiris in his vast judgment-hall will give each soul the key of the past and the future." "So say the priests, and so we believe. But to return to the Hebrews. Another time we will discourse on these themes. The new king hearing that two hundred thousand and more foreigners dwelt here, called all the elders and chief men before him; and when he had questioned them and heard their history, and had learned that the Prince Joseph, who had done so much to uphold and consolidate the Phœnician rule, was one of their ancestors, his wrath was presently kindled against them. He saw in them the friends and adherents of the overthrown dynasty; both as allied by blood to the great Hebrew prime-minister, and as originating from the same country with the expelled Phœnician king. He, therefore, perceiving they were not a warlike people, and could not be dreaded as an army, instead of declaring war against them and driving them out of Egypt, as he had done the Syrian kings, resolved to reduce them to servitude like captives taken in war. Having come to this resolution, he held as prisoners the chief men before him, and placed the whole people under the yoke of bondage, enrolling them under task-officers, and putting them to work upon the cities, temples, palaces, and canals, which the Phœnicians had either destroyed, or suffered to fall into ruin. This was the beginning, my Sesostris, of the subjugation to perpetual labor of these Syrians or Hebrews in the very land where one of their family had ruled next to the throne. They have been engaged since in building cities, and