ous of him. So one day out on the range they sold him into
slavery to a passing caravan, and went home and told their father the
boy was dead, having been killed by a wild beast. To make the matter
plausible they took the coat of Joseph and smeared it with the blood of
a goat which they had killed. Nowadays, the coat would have been sent to
a chemist's laboratory and the blood-spots tested to see whether it was
the blood of beast or human. But Jacob believed the story and mourned
his son as dead.

Now Joseph was taken to Egypt and there arose to a position of influence
and power through his intelligence and diligence. How eventually his
brethren, starving, came to him for food, there being a famine in their
own land, is one of the most natural and beautiful stories in all
literature. It is a folklore legend, free from the fabulous, and has all
the corroborating marks of the actual.

For us it is history undisputed, unrefuted, because it is so natural. It
could all easily happen in various parts of the world even now. It shows
the identical traits of human nature that are alive and pulsing today.

Joseph having made himself known to his brethren induced some of them
and their neighbors to come down into Egypt, where the pasturage was
better and the water more sure, and settle there. The Bible tells us
that there were seventy of these settlers and gives us their names.

These emigrants, called Israelites, or Children of Israel, account for
the presence of the enslaved people whom Moses led out of captivity
three hundred years later.

One thing seems quite sure, and that is that they were a peculiar people
then, with the pride of the desert in their veins, for they stood
socially aloof and did not mix with the Egyptians. They still had their
own god and clung to their own ways and customs.

That very naive account in the first chapter of Exodus of how they had
two midwives, "and the name of one was Shiphrah and the other Puah," is
as fine in its elusive exactitude as an Uncle Remus story. Children
always want to know the names of people. These two Hebrew midwives were
bribed by the King of Egypt--ruler over twenty million people--in
person, to kill all the Hebrew boy babies. Then the account states that
Jehovah was pleased with these Hebrew women who proved false to their
master, and Jehovah rewarded them by giving them houses.

This order to kill the Hebrew children must have gone into execution, if
at all, about t