teachers rather
more severe than the masters with whom they have to do nowadays.

Lesson-time occupied about half the day, and when it came to an end the
boys all ran out of the school, shouting for joy. That custom has not
changed much, anyway, in all these hundreds of years. I don't think they
had any home lessons to do, and so, perhaps, their school-time was not
quite so bad as we might imagine from the rough punishments they used to
get.

When Tahuti grew a little older, and had fairly mastered the rudiments
of writing, his teacher set him to write out copies of different
passages from the best known Egyptian books, partly to keep up his
hand-writing, and partly to teach him to know good Egyptian and to use
correct language. Sometimes it was a piece of a religious book that he
was set to copy, sometimes a poem, sometimes a fairy-tale. For the
Egyptians were very fond of fairy-tales, and later on, perhaps, we may
hear some of their stories, the oldest fairy-stories in the world. But
generally the piece that was chosen was one which would not only
exercise the boy's hand, and teach him a good style, but would also help
to teach him good manners, and fill his mind with right ideas. Very
often Tahuti's teacher would dictate to him a passage from the wise
advice which a great King of long ago left to his son, the Crown Prince,
or from some other book of the same kind. And sometimes the exercises
would be in the form of letters which the master and his pupils wrote as
though they had been friends far away from one another. Tahuti's
letters, you may be sure, were full of wisdom and of good resolutions,
and I dare say he was just about as fond of writing them as you are of
writing the letters that your teacher sometimes sets as a task for you.

When it came to Arithmetic, Tahuti was so far lucky that the number of
rules he had to learn was very few. His master taught him addition and
subtraction, and a very slow and clumsy form of multiplication; but he
could not teach him division, for the very simple reason that he did not
properly understand it himself. Enough of mensuration was taught him to
enable him to find out, though rather roughly, what was the size of a
field, and how much corn would go into a granary of any particular size.
And when he had learned these things, his elementary education was
pretty well over.

[Illustration: Plate 7
NAVE OF THE TEMPLE AT KARNAK. _Pages_ 75, 76]

Of course a great deal would