nce? Why not banish these spies
and select servants from the military caste, for instance? They would be
quite as useful as the priests."

"Ah! if I only could, if I dared!" exclaimed Amasis loudly. And then,
as if frightened at his own rashness, he continued in a low voice, "I
believe that even here I am being watched. To-morrow I will have that
grove of fig-trees yonder uprooted. The young priest there, who seems
so fond of gardening, has other fruit in his mind besides the half-ripe
figs that he is so slowly dropping into his basket. While his hand is
plucking the figs, his ear gathers the words that fall from the mouth of
his king."

"But, by our father Zeus, and by Apollo--"

"Yes, I understand thy indignation and I share it; but every position
has its duties, and as a king of a people who venerate tradition as the
highest divinity, I must submit, at least in the main, to the ceremonies
handed down through thousands of years. Were I to burst these fetters,
I know positively that at my death my body would remain unburied; for,
know that the priests sit in judgment over every corpse, and deprive the
condemned of rest, even in the grave."

[This well-known custom among the ancient Egyptians is confirmed,
not only by many Greek narrators, but by the laboriously erased
inscriptions discovered in the chambers of some tombs.]

"Why care about the grave?" cried Croesus, becoming angry. "We live for
life, not for death!"

"Say rather," answered Amasis rising from his seat, "we, with our Greek
minds, believe a beautiful life to be the highest good. But Croesus, I
was begotten and nursed by Egyptian parents, nourished on Egyptian food,
and though I have accepted much that is Greek, am still, in my innermost
being, an Egyptian. What has been sung to us in our childhood, and
praised as sacred in our youth, lingers on in the heart until the day
which sees us embalmed as mummies. I am an old man and have but a short
span yet to run, before I reach the landmark which separates us from
that farther country. For the sake of life's few remaining days, shall
I willingly mar Death's thousands of years? No, my friend, in this point
at least I have remained an Egyptian, in believing, like the rest of
my countrymen, that the happiness of a future life in the kingdom of
Osiris, depends on the preservation of my body, the habitation of the
soul.

[Each human soul was considered as a part of the world-soul Osiris,
was