e of the subject race, and the thought that one word from
his lips would suffice to secure his reception in the ranks of the rulers
forced itself suddenly on his mind; but he repressed it with all his
might, and silently allowed himself to be conducted to a terrace screened
by a vine-covered trellis from the heat of the sun.

He sat down on one of the marble seats by the parapet of this hanging
garden and looked westward. He knew the scene well, it was the playground
of his childhood and youth; hundreds of times the picture had spread
before him, and yet it affected him to-day as it had never done before.
Was there on earth--he asked himself--a more fertile and luxuriant land?
Had not even the Greek poets sung of the Nile as the most venerable of
rivers? Had not great Caesar himself been so fascinated by the idea of
discovering its source that to that end--so he had declared--he would
have thought the dominion of the world well lost? On the produce of those
wide fields the weal and woe of the mightiest cities of the earth had
been dependent for centuries; nay, imperial Rome and sovereign
Constantinople had quaked with fears of famine, when a bad harvest here
had disappointed the hopes of the husbandman.

And was there anywhere a more industrious nation of laborers, had there
ever been, before them, a thriftier or a more skilful race? When he
looked back on the fate and deeds of nations, on the remotest horizon
where the thread of history was scarcely perceptible, that same gigantic
Sphinx was there--the first and earliest monument of human joy in
creative art--those Pyramids which still proudly stood in undiminished
and inaccessible majesty beyond the Nile, beyond the ruined capital of
his forefathers, at the foot of the Libyan range. He was the son of the
men who had raised these imperishable works, and in his veins perchance
there still might flow a drop of the blood of those Pharaohs who had
sought eternal rest in these vast tombs, and whose greater progeny, had
overrun half the world with their armies, and had exacted tribute and
submission. He, who had often felt flattered at being praised for the
purity of his Greek--pure not merely for his time: an age of bastard
tongues--and for the engaging Hellenism of his person, here and now had
an impulse of pride of his Egyptian origin. He drew a deep breath, as he
gazed at the sinking sun; it seemed to lend intentional significance to
the rich beauty of his home as its ma