have to do any in heaven? So
they thought that they would find out a way of taking their slaves with
them into the other world. I fancy that at first they actually tried to
take them by killing the slaves at their master's grave. When the
funeral of a great man took place, some of his servants would be killed
beside the tomb, so that they might go with their lord into heaven, and
work for him there, as they had worked for him on earth.

But the Egyptians were always a gentle, kind-hearted people, and they
quickly grew disgusted with the idea of such cruelty, so they found
another way out of the difficulty. They got numbers of little clay
figures made in the form of servants--one with a hoe on his shoulder,
another with a basket in his hand, and so on. They called these little
figures "Answerers," and when a man was buried, they buried a lot of
these clay servants along with him, so that, when he reached heaven, and
was summoned to do work in the Field of Bulrushes, the Answerers would
rise up and answer for him, and take the task off his shoulders.

So, along with the mummies of the dead Egyptians, there is often found
quite a number of these tiny figures, all ready to make heaven easy for
their master when he gets there. They have sometimes a little verse
written upon them, to tell the Answerer what he has got to do in the
other world. It runs like this:

"Oh, thou Answerer, when I am called, and when I am asked to do any kind
of work that is done in heaven, and am required at any time to cause
the field to flourish, or to convey the sand from east to west, thou
shalt say, 'Here am I.'"

It all seems rather a curious idea of heaven, does it not? And most
curious of all is the idea of dodging work in the other world by
carrying a bundle of china dolls to heaven with you. But, even if we
think that very ridiculous, we need not forget that the Egyptians had a
wonderfully clear and sure grasp of the fact that it is a man's
character in this world which will make him either happy or unhappy in
the next, and that evil-doing, even if it escapes punishment in this
life, is a thing that God will surely punish at last.

Remember that these men of old, wonderfully wise and strong as they were
in many ways, were still the children of the time when the world was
young; like children, forming many false and even ridiculous ideas about
things they could not understand; like children, too, reaching out their
groping hands throug