h forward a spokesman, and he begins,
rather sheepishly at first, but warming up as he goes along, to make
their complaint to the great man.

He and his mates, he says, have been working for weeks. They have had no
wages; they have not even had the corn and oil which ought to be issued
as rations to Government workmen. So they have struck work, and now they
have come to their lord the Prince to entreat him either to give command
that the rations be issued, or, if his stores are exhausted, to appeal
to Pharaoh. "We have been driven here by hunger and thirst; we have no
clothes, we have no oil, we have no food. Write to our lord the Pharaoh,
that he may give us something for our sustenance." When the spokesman
has finished his complaint, the whole crowd volubly assents to what he
has said, and sways to and fro in a very threatening manner.

Prince Paser, however, is an old hand at dealing with such complaints.
With a smiling face he promises that fifty sacks of corn shall be sent
to the cemetery immediately, with oil to correspond. Only the workmen
must go back to their work at once, and there must be no more chasing of
poor Secretary Amen-nachtu. Otherwise, he can do nothing. The workmen
grumble a little. They have been put off with promises before, and have
got little good of them. But they have no leader bold enough to start a
riot, and they have no weapons, and the spears and bows of the Prince's
Nubians look dangerous. Finally they turn, and disappear, grumbling,
down the street from which they came; and Prince Paser, with a shrug of
his shoulders, goes indoors again. Whether the fifty sacks of corn are
ever sent or not, is another matter. Strikes, you see, were not unknown,
even so long ago as this.

CHAPTER III

A DAY IN THEBES--_Continued_

Having seen the settlement of the masons' strike, we wander up into the
heart of the town. The streets are generally narrow and winding, and
here and there the houses actually meet overhead, so that we pass out of
the blinding sunlight into a sort of dark tunnel. Some of the houses
are large and high; but even the largest make no display towards the
street. They will be fine enough inside, with bright courts surrounded
with trees, in the midst of which lies a cool pond of water, and with
fine rooms decorated with gay hangings; but their outer walls are almost
absolutely blank, with nothing but a heavy door breaking the dead line.
We pass by some quarters where ther