r, laden with heavy
chains, five days later, smiling bitterly as, with forty companions in
misfortune, he was led through the gate of victory in Tanis toward the
east.

The mines in the Sinai peninsula, where more convict labor was needed,
were the goal of these unfortunate men.

The prisoner's smile lingered a short time, then drawing up his muscular
frame, his bearded lips murmured: "Strong and steadfast!" and as if he
desired to transmit the support he had himself found he whispered to the
youth marching at his side: "Courage, Ephraim, courage! Don't gaze down
at the dust, but upward, whatever may come."

"Silence in the ranks!" shouted one of the armed Libyan guards, who
accompanied the convicts, to the older prisoner, raising his whip with
a significant gesture. The man thus threatened was Joshua, and his
companion in suffering Ephraim, who had been sentenced to share his
fate.

What this was every child in Egypt knew, for "May I be sent to the
mines!" was one of the most terrible oaths of the common people, and
no prisoner's lot was half so hard as that of the convicted
state-criminals.

A series of the most terrible humiliations and tortures awaited them.
The vigor of the robust was broken by unmitigated toil; the exhausted
were forced to execute tasks so far beyond their strength that they soon
found the eternal rest for which their tortured souls longed. To be sent
to the mines meant to be doomed to a slow, torturing death; yet life is
so dear to men that it was considered a milder punishment to be dragged
to forced labor in the mines than to be delivered up to the executioner.

Joshua's encouraging words had little effect upon Ephraim; but when,
a few minutes later, a chariot shaded by an umbrella, passed the
prisoners, a chariot in which a slender woman of aristocratic bearing
stood beside a matron behind the driver, he turned with a hasty movement
and gazed after the equipage with sparkling eyes till it vanished in the
dust of the road.

The younger woman had been closely veiled, but Ephraim thought he
recognized her for whose sake he had gone to his ruin, and whose
lightest sign he would still have obeyed.

And he was right; the lady in the chariot was Kasana, the daughter of
Hornecht, captain of the archers, and the matron was her nurse.

At a little temple by the road-side, where, in the midst of a grove of
Nile acacias, a well was maintained for travellers, she bade the matron
wait for her an