of the
Most High. He believed in His limitless power and, for the first time,
felt a dawning hope that the Mighty Lord who had created heaven and
earth would find ways and means to save His chosen people from the
thousands of the Egyptian hosts.

After fervently imploring God to extend His protecting hand over the
feeble bands who, obedient to His command, had left so much behind them
and marched so confidently through an unknown and distant land, and
commended to His special charge the aged father whom he himself could
not defend, a wonderful sense of peace filled his soul.

The shouts of the guards, the rattling of the chain, his wretched
companions in misfortune, nay, all that surrounded him, could not fail
to recall the fate awaiting him. He was to grow grey in slavish toil
within a close, hot pit, whose atmosphere choked the lungs, deprived of
the bliss of breathing the fresh air and beholding the sunlight; loaded
with chains, beaten and insulted, starving and thirsting, spending days
and nights in a monotony destructive alike to soul and body,--yet not
for one moment did he lose the confident belief that this horrible lot
might befall any one rather than himself, and something must interpose
to save him.

On the march farther eastward, which began with the first grey dawn of
morning, he called this resolute confidence folly, yet strove to retain
it and succeeded.

The road led through the desert, and at the end of a few hours' rapid
march they reached the first fort, called the Fortress of Seti. Long
before, they had seen it through the clear desert air, apparently within
a bowshot.

Unrelieved by the green foliage of bush or palmtree, it rose from the
bare, stony, sandy soil, with its wooden palisades, its rampart, its
escarped walls, and its lookout, with broad, flat roof, swarming with
armed warriors. The latter had heard from Pithom that the Hebrews were
preparing to break through the chain of fortresses on the isthmus and
had at first mistaken the approaching band of prisoners for the vanguard
of the wandering Israelites.

From the summits of the strong projections, which jutted like galleries
from every direction along the entire height of the escarped walls to
prevent the planting of scaling-ladders, soldiers looked through the
embrasures at the advancing convicts; yet the archers had replaced their
arrows in the quivers, for the watchmen in the towers perceived how few
were the numbers of the appr