s the name for the mouse in old Egyptian]--because
it was so pretty, like a little mouse. I kept away from the foreign
quarter, and saved my wages, and bought a goat, which lived in front of
our door when I took the woman to her own hut.

"She was dumb, but not deaf, only she did not understand our language;
but the demon in her eyes spoke for her and understood what I said. She
comprehended everything, and could say everything with her eyes; but
best of all she knew how to thank one. No high-priest who at the great
hill festival praises the Gods in long hymns for their gifts can return
thanks so earnestly with his lips as she with her dumb eyes. And when
she wished to pray, then it seemed as though the demon in her look was
mightier than ever.

"At first I used to be impatient enough when she leaned so feebly
against the wall, or when the child cried and disturbed my sleep; but
she had only to look up, and the demon pressed my heart together and
persuaded me that the crying was really a song. Pennu cried more sweetly
too than other children, and he had such soft, white, pretty little
fingers.

"One day he had been crying for a long time, At last I bent down over
him, and was going to scold him, but he seized me by the beard. It was
pretty to see! Afterwards he was for ever wanting to pull me about,
and his mother noticed that that pleased me, for when I brought home
anything good, an egg or a flower or a cake, she used to hold him up and
place his little hands on my beard.

"Yes, in a few months the woman had learnt to hold him up high in her
arms, for with care and quiet she had grown stronger. White she always
remained and delicate, but she grew younger and more beautiful from day
to day; she can hardly have numbered twenty years when I bought her.
What she was called I never heard; nor did we give her any name. She was
'the woman,' and so we called her.

"Eight moons passed by, and then the little Mouse died. I wept as she
did, and as I bent over the little corpse and let my tears have free
course, and thought--now he can never lift up his pretty little finger
to you again; then I felt for the first time the woman's soft hand on my
cheek. She stroked my rough beard as a child might, and with that looked
at me so gratefully that I felt as though king Pharaoh had all at once
made me a present of both Upper and Lower Egypt.

"When the Mouse was buried she got weaker again, but my mother took good
care of her. I