t by
his cloak, cried, "I am Aristomachus the Spartan!"

Cruelly as he was altered, Phanes recognized his old friend at once,
ordered his feet to be washed and his head anointed, gave him wine and
meat to revive his strength, took his rags off and laid a new chiton
over his emaciated, but still sinewy, frame.

Aristomachus received all in silence; and when the food and wine had
given him strength to speak, began the following answer to Phanes' eager
questions.

On the murder of Phanes' son by Psamtik, he had declared his intention
of leaving Egypt and inducing the troops under his command to do the
same, unless his friend's little daughter were at once set free, and a
satisfactory explanation given for the sudden disappearance of the boy.
Psamtik promised to consider the matter. Two days later, as Aristomachus
was going up the Nile by night to Memphis, he was seized by Egyptian
soldiers, bound and thrown into the dark hold of a boat, which, after a
voyage of many days and nights, cast anchor on a totally unknown shore.
The prisoners were taken out of their dungeon and led across a desert
under the burning sun, and past rocks of strange forms, until they
reached a range of mountains with a colony of huts at its base. These
huts were inhabited by human beings, who, with chains on their feet,
were driven every morning into the shaft of a mine and there compelled
to hew grains of gold out of the stony rock. Many of these miserable men
had passed forty years in this place, but most died soon, overcome by
the hard work and the fearful extremes of heat and cold to which they
were exposed on entering and leaving the mine.

[Diodorus (III. 12.) describes the compulsory work in the gold mines
with great minuteness. The convicts were either prisoners taken in
war, or people whom despotism in its blind fury found it expedient
to put out of the way. The mines lay in the plain of Koptos, not
far from the Red Sea. Traces of them have been discovered in modern
times. Interesting inscriptions of the time of Rameses the Great,
(14 centuries B. C.) referring to the gold-mines, have been found,
one at Radesich, the other at Kubnn, and have been published and
deciphered in Europe.]

"My companions," continued Aristomachus, "were either condemned
murderers to whom mercy had been granted, or men guilty of high treason
whose tongues had been cut out, and others such as myself whom the king
had reason to fear. T