ites among the children, and knew some as being
industrious and careful, others as idle and heedless:

"Ay! ay!" she exclaimed, bending over a little half-naked maiden with
great almond-shaped eyes. "You are mixing them all together. Your
father, as you tell me, is at the war. Suppose, now, an arrow were
to strike him, and this plant, which would hurt him, were laid on the
burning wound instead of this other, which would do him good--that would
be very sad."

The child nodded her head, and looked her work through again. Nefert
turned to a little idler, and said: "You are chattering again, and doing
nothing, and yet your father is in the field. If he were ill now, and
has no medicine, and if at night when he is asleep he dreams of you, and
sees you sitting idle, he may say to himself: 'Now I might get well, but
my little girl at home does not love me, for she would rather sit with
her hands in her lap than sort herbs for her sick father.'"

Then Nefert turned to a large group of the girls, who were sorting
plants, and said: "Do you, children, know the origin of all these
wholesome, healing herbs? The good Horus went out to fight against Seth,
the murderer of his father, and the horrible enemy wounded Horus in the
eye in the struggle; but the son of Osiris conquered, for good always
conquers evil. But when Isis saw the bad wound, she pressed her son's
head to her bosom, and her heart was as sad as that of any poor human
mother that holds her suffering child in her arms. And she thought: 'How
easy it is to give wounds, and how hard it is to heal them!' and so she
wept; one tear after another fell on the earth, and wherever they wetted
the ground there sprang up a kindly healing plant."

"Isis is good!" cried a little girl opposite to her. "Mother says Isis
loves children when they are good."

"Your mother is right," replied Nefert. "Isis herself has her dear
little son Horus; and every human being that dies, and that was good,
becomes a child again, and the Goddess makes it her own, and takes it to
her breast, and nurses it with her sister Nephthys till he grows up and
can fight for his father."

Nefert observed that while she spoke one of the women was crying. She
went up to her, and learned that her husband and her son were both dead,
the former in Syria, and the latter after his return to Egypt. "Poor
soul!" said Nefert. "Now you will be very careful, that the wounds of
others may be healed. I will tell you someth