the people, and he died after making his family promise to carry his
body back into Canaan to be buried with his fathers when they
themselves should go.

"For God will surely visit you," he said, "and bring you out of this
land into the land which he promised to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob."

CHAPTER IX.

THE CRADLE THAT WAS ROCKED BY A RIVER.

After Joseph and all the sons of Jacob had grown old and had passed
away, their children's children grew in numbers until they became a
great multitude.

The Pharaoh whom Joseph had served also died, and the king who followed
him did not like the Hebrews. He feared them because they had grown to
be strong, so he set overseers to watch them, and make them work like
slaves.

He treated them cruelly, and made them lift the great stones with which
they built the tombs of the kings and temples of the gods. He also
tried to kill all the little boys as soon as they were born, but the
Lord took care of them. Also, the king told his servants, that
wherever they found a baby boy among the Hebrews, to throw him into the
river Nile, but the little girls, they should save alive.

There was a man named Amrom, who, with his wife Jochebed, had a
beautiful little boy whom they tenderly loved. They hid him as long as
they could, and then when he was three months old and she could hide
him no longer, she made up her mind to give him into the care of God.
She made a little boat, or ark of stout rushes, that grew by the river.
She wove it closer than a basket, and then covered it with pitch that
the water might not enter, just as Noah covered the great ark before
the flood.

Then she wrapped her baby carefully and laid him in the little boat,
and set it among the reeds at the edge of the river Nile. God and His
angels watched the cradle of the child, and the river gently rocked it.
Jochebed told the baby's sister to wait near by and see what might
happen to him, and this is what happened, or rather what God prepared
for the baby in the boat of rushes.

The king's daughter came down to bathe in the river, and as her maidens
walked up and down by the riverside, she called one of them to bring to
her the little ark that she saw rocking on the river among the reeds.
When she had opened it she saw a beautiful little child, and when it
cried her heart was touched, and she longed to keep it for her own.

[Illustration: Pharaoh's daughter finding Moses]

"This is one of the Hebr