upon him. What
to him was the well-ordered and disciplined army, among whose leaders be
had numbered himself with such joyous pride?

He could scarcely realize that there had been a time when he aspired to
nothing higher than to command more and still more thousands of
Egyptians, when his heart had swelled at the bestowal of a new title or
glittering badge of honor by those whom he held most unworthy of his
esteem.

From the Egyptians he had expected everything, from his own people
nothing.

That very night before his tent the great mass of the men of his own
blood had been repulsive to him as pitiful slaves languishing in
dishonorable, servile toil. Even the better classes he had arrogantly
patronized; for they were but shepherds and as such contemptible to the
Egyptians, whose opinions he shared.

His own father was also the owner of herds and, though he held him in
high esteem, it was in spite of his position and only because his whole
character commanded reverence; because the superb old man's fiery vigor
won love from every one, and above all from him, his grateful son.

He had never ceased to gladly acknowledge his kinship to him, but in
other respects he had striven to so bear himself among his
brothers-in-arms that they should forget his origin and regard him in
everything as one of themselves. His ancestress Asenath, the wife of
Joseph, had been an Egyptian and he had boasted of the fact.

And now,--to-day?

He would have made any one feel the weight of his wrath who reproached
him with being an Egyptian; and what at the last new moon he would only
too willingly have cast aside and concealed, as though it were a
disgrace, made him on the night of the next new moon whose stars were
just beginning to shine, raise his head with joyous pride.

What a lofty emotion it was to feel himself with just complacency the man
he really was!

His life and deeds as an Egyptian chief now seemed like a perpetual lie,
a constant desertion of his ideal.

His truthful nature exulted in the consciousness that the base denial and
concealment of his birth was at an end.

With joyous gratitude he felt that he was one of the people whom the Most
High preferred to all others, that he belonged to a community, whose
humblest members, nay even the children, could raise their hands in
prayer to the God whom the loftiest minds among the Egyptians surrounded
with the barriers of secrecy, because they considered their people too