to his savings. He
would gladly have stayed with her, but his father had commanded him to
go forth, so there was no choice for them save to obey and part forever.

The words were simple and the accents harsh, yet they pierced the heart
of the man who was preparing to follow his own path in opposition to his
father's will.

As they approached the harbor and Hosea saw the embankments, and the
vast fortified storehouses built by his own people, he remembered
the ragged laborers whom he had so often beheld crouching before the
Egyptian overseers or fighting savagely among themselves. He had heard,
too, that they shrunk from no lies, no fraud to escape their toil, and
how difficult was the task of compelling them to obey and fulfil their
duty.

The most repulsive forms among these luckless hordes rose distinctly
before his vision, and the thought that it might henceforward be his
destiny to command such a wretched rabble seemed to him ignominy which
the lowest of his brave officers, the leader of but fifty men, would
seek to avoid. True, Pharaoh's armies contained many a Hebrew mercenary
who had won renown for bravery and endurance; but these men were the
sons of owners of herds or people who had once been shepherds. The
toiling slaves, whose clay huts could be upset by a kick, formed the
majority of those to whom he was required to return.

Resolute in his purpose to remain loyal to the oath which bound him to
the Egyptian standard, yet moved to the very depths of his heart, he
entered the slave's little hut, and his anger rose when he saw old Eliab
sitting up, mixing some wine and water with his own hands. So he had
been summoned from his nephew's sick-bed, and robbed of his night's
rest, on a false pretence, in order that a slave, in his eyes scarcely
entitled to rank as a man, might have his way. Here he himself
experienced a specimen of the selfish craft of which the Egyptians
accused his people, and which certainly did not attract him, Hosea, to
them. But the anger of the just, keen sighted-man quickly subsided
at the sight of the girl's unfeigned joy in her grandfather's speedy
recovery. Besides he soon learned from the old man's aged wife that,
shortly after Hogla's departure, she remembered the wine they had, and
as soon as he swallowed the first draught her husband, whom she had
believed had one foot in the grave, grew better and better. Now he was
mixing some more of God's gift to strengthen himself occasional