He spoke with deep feeling. We walked some distance side by side without speaking. After a few moments' silence I said--
"He will faithfully serve you, my lord prince. He is of my kindred, and I shall be grateful to you for protecting his weakness. Every shoulder in Israel cannot bear the burden!"
"Are you then of the family of Miriam?" I asked, recollecting that the ritual transcriber, in the palace of the hierarch, had also claimed kindred with the son of the venerable Ben Isaac.
"In the service of Luxora and Osiria, of Memphis."
"I would have said it!" I answered. "Is your father living?"
"He is in charge of the queen's flower-garden in On."
"It is he who has spoken of you to me, as well as the aged Ben Isaac, young Israel, and Miriam. Therefore did I at once recognize you, when your polished words led me to see that you were in rank above chief pilots and governors of galleys."
"Will you reply to my inquiry? for, as we know each other's friends, we need not now discourse wholly as strangers. How came you, being a Hebrew, to become a priest? Do not you Hebrews worship the One Infinite Maker and Upholder of worlds?"
"There are a few who retain, unmixed with superstition and idol-worship, the knowledge of the one God of our ancestors Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph; but this knowledge is confined, chiefly, to the descendants of one man, Levi; and only to a few of these. The residue are little better than the Egyptians."
"Art thou of the family of this Levi?" I asked.
"I am. We are more given to study than our brethren, and seek knowledge and wisdom. Hence it is, that some of our tribe are taken from the labor of the field to serve the priests. We are ready writers, skilful with the stylus and the coloring pencil, and our lot is preferable to that of others, who are more ignorant. Hence you behold me a servitor in an Egyptian temple!"
"Hast thou long been in this service?" I asked, as we stopped in the shade of the pyramidion of an obelisk, in front of the temple porch.
"So early! Then thou hast not borne the toils of thy people."
"I was discovered upon the banks of the Nile, in my fourth year, near the Island of Rhoda, weeping bitterly; for I had seen my mother commit my infant brother to a basket and launch it upon the river; and observing it borne down by the current, young as I was, I so felt all its danger, that I ran as well as I could along the shore crying piteously, when a priest (who has made known to me the incident) seeing me, took pity upon me, and noticing that I was a Hebrew child led me away, pacifying me by saying that I should see my brother. From that time I have been an inmate of the temple; for my mother seeing him take me away followed, and as he promised he would rear me as his own son, and that I should see her weekly, she yielded me up to him with reluctant gladness; for, my lord prince, in that day the children of Hebrew parents were not safe even at home, an edict having been published commanding all male infants to be strangled or drowned. Mothers held their children by a slight tenure, and seeing that the protection of a priest would insure my safety, and spare me the toils to which the little ones of our nation were early condemned, my parents readily acquiesced in the wishes of the priest."