id not know the Egyptian tongue.

Moreover they told their story from the very beginning, when they had
entered Egypt hundreds of years before and were succoured by the vizier
of the Pharaoh of that day, one Yusuf, a powerful and clever man of
their race who stored corn in a time of famine and low Niles. This
Pharaoh was of the Hyksos people, one of the Shepherd kings whom we
Egyptians hated and after many wars drove out of Khem. Under these
Shepherd kings, being joined by many of their own blood, the Israelites
grew rich and powerful, so that the Pharaohs who came after and who
loved them not, began to fear them.

This was as far as the story was taken on the first day.

On the second day began the tale of their oppression, under which,
however, they still multiplied like gnats upon the Nile, and grew so
strong and numerous that at length the great Rameses did a wicked thing,
ordering that their male children should be put to death. This order was
never carried out, because his daughter, she who found Moses among the
reeds of the river, pleaded for them.

At this point the Prince, wearied with the noise and heat in that
crowded place, broke off the sitting until the morrow. Commanding me to
accompany him, he ordered a chariot, not his own, to be made ready, and,
although I prayed him not to do so, set out unguarded save for myself
and the charioteer, saying that he would see how these people laboured
with his own eyes.

Taking a Hebrew lad to run before the horses as our guide, we drove
to the banks of a canal where the Israelites made bricks of mud which,
after drying in the sun, were laden into boats that waited for them on
the canal and taken away to other parts of Egypt to be used on Pharaoh's
works. Thousands of men were engaged upon this labour, toiling in gangs
under the command of Egyptian overseers who kept count of the bricks,
cutting their number upon tally sticks, or sometimes writing them upon
sherds. These overseers were brutal fellows, for the most part of the
low class, who used vile language to the slaves. Nor were they content
with words. Noting a crowd gathered at one place and hearing cries, we
went to see what passed. Here we found a lad stretched upon the ground
being cruelly beaten with hide whips, so that the blood ran down him.
At a sign from the Prince I asked what he had done and was told roughly,
for the overseers and their guards did not know who we were, that during
the past six days