twenty suitors, to a man who terms himself our friend, yet finds no
leisure to greet us in our own house! To keep fast hold of the lad is
another thing, I will see to that."

CHAPTER XI.

The midnight heavens, decked with countless stars, spanned with their
cloudless azure vault the flat plains of the eastern Delta and the city
of Succoth, called by the Egyptians, from their sanctuary, the place of
the god Tum, or Pithom.

The March night was drawing toward its end, pallid mists floated over the
canal, the work of Hebrew bondmen which, as far as the eye could reach,
intersected the plain, watering the fields and pastures along its course.

Eastward and southward the sky was shrouded by dense veils of mist that
rose from the large lakes and from the narrow estuaries that ran far up
into the isthmus. The hot and dusty desert wind, which the day before had
swept over the parched grass and the tents and houses of Succoth, had
subsided at nightfall; and the cool atmosphere which in March, even in
Egypt, precedes the approach of dawn, made itself felt.

Whoever had formerly entered, between midnight and morning, the humble
frontier hamlet with its shepherd tents, wretched hovels of Nile mud, and
by no means handsome farms and dwellings, would scarcely have recognized
it now. Even the one noticeable building in the place--besides the
stately temple of the sungod Turn--the large fortified store-house,
presented at this hour an unfamiliar aspect. Its long white-washed walls,
it is true, glimmered through the gloom as distinctly as ever, but
instead of towering--as usual at this time--mute and lifeless above the
slumbering town--the most active bustle was going on within and around
it. It was intended also as a defense against the predatory hordes of the
Shasu,

[Bedouins, who dwelt as nomads in the desert adjacent to Egypt, now
regarded as part of Asia.]

who had made a circuit around the fortified works on the isthmus, and its
indestructible walls contained an Egyptian garrison, who could easily
defend it against a force greatly superior in numbers.

To-day it looked as if the sons of the desert had assailed it; but the
men and women who were bustling about below and on the broad parapet of
the gigantic building were Hebrews, not Shasu. With loud outcries and
gesticulations of delight they were seizing the thousands of measures of
wheat, barley, rye, and durra, the stores of pulse, dates, and onions
they fo