st evidence
of guilt, remained standing on the shore. A few moments later he was
surrounded by at least a hundred priests.

"Even the high-priest of Ptah, my old enemy Ptahotep, had not disdained
to follow the pursuers in person.

"Many of the latter, and amongst them the perfidious palace-servant,
rushed at once into the Nile, and there, to our confusion, found the bag
with its twelve little corpses, hanging entirely uninjured among the
Papyrus-reeds and bean-tendrils. The cotton coffin was opened before the
eyes of the high-priest, a troop of lower priests, and at least a
thousand of the inhabitants of Memphis, who had hurried to the spot, and
when the miserable contents were disclosed, there arose such fearful
howls of anguish, and such horrible cries of mingled lamentation and
revenge, that I heard them even in the palace.

"The furious multitude, in their wild rage, fell on my poor servant,
threw him down, trampled on him and would have killed him, had not the
all-powerful high-priest-designing to involve me, as author of the crime,
in the same ruin--commanded them to cease and take the wretched
malefactor to prison.

"Half an hour later I was in prison too.

"My old Mus took all the guilt of the crime on himself, until at last, by
means of the bastinado, the high-priest forced him to confess that I had
ordered the killing of the kittens, and that he, as a faithful servant,
had not dared to disobey.

"The supreme court of justice, whose decisions the king himself has no
power to reverse, is composed of priests from Memphis, Heliopolis and
Thebes: you can therefore easily believe that they had no scruple in
pronouncing sentence of death on poor Mus and my own unworthy Greek self.
The slave was pronounced guilty of two capital offences: first, of the
murder of the sacred animals, and secondly, of a twelve-fold pollution of
the Nile through dead bodies. I was condemned as originator of this, (as
they termed it) four-and-twenty-fold crime.

[According to the Egyptian law, the man who was cognizant of a crime
was held equally culpable with the perpetrator.]

"Mus was executed on the same day. May the earth rest lightly on him! I
shall never think of him again as my slave, but as a friend and
benefactor! My sentence of death was read aloud in the presence of his
dead body, and I was already preparing for a long journey into the nether
world, when the king sent and commanded a reprieve.

[This court of