mong the
ruins of an ancient Egyptian city--a city built before the time of
Moses. Bright yellow sand had drifted over the broken columns and
painted pavements of what had once been the palace of a great king.
But the peasant woman did not care for that. Was there anything hidden
in the sand that she could sell? This was all her thought.

Suddenly her foot struck against something hard in the sand. She
looked down. Could it be a stone?

No, it was not a stone, but a queer oblong lump, or tablet of clay,
hardened into a brick, and covered with strange marks that looked like
writing. She wondered at it, for with all her findings in the ruins
she had never come upon anything like this before.

She showed the tablet to her friends, and they dug down deep in the
sand, and found whole sackfuls of baked clay tablets. But when the
dealer in curiosities saw the lumps of baked clay he shook his head,
and would give very little money for them.

After a while some of the bricks were taken to Paris and London.

'These tablets could _not_ have been found in Egypt,' decided the
learned professors; 'they are either imitations, or they were found
somewhere else. These are clay letters, and must have been written in
Assyria or Babylonia. No Egyptian could have understood a word of
them.'

Yet the tablets had been found in Egypt, and had been read by the king
of Egypt's scribes, for the peasant woman, had all unknowingly
discovered what remained of the Foreign Office belonging to the old
Egyptian nation, and thus we see that the Egyptians of Moses' time
could read and write foreign languages as easily as we can to-day read
and write French or German!

CHAPTER II

THE SECRET OF ITS GREATNESS

[Illustration: (drop cap G) The Great Pyramid]

God always chooses the right kind of people to do His work. Not only
so, He always gives to those whom He chooses just the sort of life
which will best prepare them for the work He will one day call them to
do.

That is why God put it into the heart of Pharaoh's daughter to bring up
Moses as her own son in the Egyptian palace.

The most important part of Moses' training was that his heart should be
right with God, and therefore he was allowed to remain with his Hebrew
parents during his early years. There he learned to love and serve the
one true God. Without that knowledge no education can make a man or
woman fit to be a blessing to the world.

But after this God gave