goal, namely the exaltation
of the power and dignity of the hierarchy. The king appreciated this
remarkable man, and had long endeavored to attach him to the court, as
keeper of the royal seal; but Ameni was not to be induced to give up
his apparently modest position; for he contemned all outward show
and ostentatious titles; he ventured sometimes to oppose a decided
resistance to the measures of the Pharaoh,

[Pharaoh is the Hebrew form of the Egyptian Peraa--or Phrah. "The
great house," "sublime house," or "high gate" is the literal
meaning.]

and was not minded to give up his unlimited control of the priests for
the sake of a limited dominion over what seemed to him petty external
concerns, in the service of a king who was only too independent and hard
to influence.

He regularly arranged his mode and habits of life in an exceptional way.

Eight days out of ten he remained in the temple entrusted to his charge;
two he devoted to his family, who lived on the other bank of the Nile;
but he let no one, not even those nearest to him, know what portion of
the ten days he gave up to recreation. He required only four hours of
sleep. This he usually took in a dark room which no sound could reach,
and in the middle of the day; never at night, when the coolness and
quiet seemed to add to his powers of work, and when from time to time he
could give himself up to the study of the starry heavens.

All the ceremonials that his position required of him, the cleansing,
purification, shaving, and fasting he fulfilled with painful exactitude,
and the outer bespoke the inner man.

Ameni was entering on his fiftieth year; his figure was tall, and had
escaped altogether the stoutness to which at that age the Oriental is
liable. The shape of his smoothly-shaven head was symmetrical and of a
long oval; his forehead was neither broad nor high, but his profile was
unusually delicate, and his face striking; his lips were thin and dry,
and his large and piercing eyes, though neither fiery nor brilliant, and
usually cast down to the ground under his thick eyebrows, were raised
with a full, clear, dispassionate gaze when it was necessary to see and
to examine.

The poet of the House of Seti, the young Pentaur, who knew these eyes,
had celebrated them in song, and had likened them to a well-disciplined
army which the general allows to rest before and after the battle, so
that they may march in full strength to victory in the fig