arter,
and saved my wages, and bought a goat, which lived in front of our door
when I took the woman to her own hut.

"She was dumb, but not deaf, only she did not understand our language;
but the demon in her eyes spoke for her and understood what I said. She
comprehended everything, and could say everything with her eyes; but best
of all she knew how to thank one. No high-priest who at the great hill
festival praises the Gods in long hymns for their gifts can return thanks
so earnestly with his lips as she with her dumb eyes. And when she wished
to pray, then it seemed as though the demon in her look was mightier than
ever.

"At first I used to be impatient enough when she leaned so feebly against
the wall, or when the child cried and disturbed my sleep; but she had
only to look up, and the demon pressed my heart together and persuaded me
that the crying was really a song. Pennu cried more sweetly too than
other children, and he had such soft, white, pretty little fingers.

"One day he had been crying for a long time, At last I bent down over
him, and was going to scold him, but he seized me by the beard. It was
pretty to see! Afterwards he was for ever wanting to pull me about, and
his mother noticed that that pleased me, for when I brought home anything
good, an egg or a flower or a cake, she used to hold him up and place his
little hands on my beard.

"Yes, in a few months the woman had learnt to hold him up high in her
arms, for with care and quiet she had grown stronger. White she always
remained and delicate, but she grew younger and more beautiful from day
to day; she can hardly have numbered twenty years when I bought her. What
she was called I never heard; nor did we give her any name. She was 'the
woman,' and so we called her.

"Eight moons passed by, and then the little Mouse died. I wept as she
did, and as I bent over the little corpse and let my tears have free
course, and thought--now he can never lift up his pretty little finger to
you again; then I felt for the first time the woman's soft hand on my
cheek. She stroked my rough beard as a child might, and with that looked
at me so gratefully that I felt as though king Pharaoh had all at once
made me a present of both Upper and Lower Egypt.

"When the Mouse was buried she got weaker again, but my mother took good
care of her. I lived with her, like a father with his child. She was
always friendly, but if I approached her, and tried to show her any