not taken
part with him.

"So it will be with thee!" cried he to Ramses.

The prince sprang into his boat and in a rage commanded the boatman to
pursue the insolent servant of the usurer. But he of the sheepskin wig
threw down the cane, took an oar himself, and his men helped him so
well that pursuit became impossible.

"Sooner could an owl overtake a lark than we overtake them, my
beautiful lord," cried the prince's boatman, laughing. "But who art
thou? Thou art not a surveyor, but an officer, maybe even an officer of
the guard of his holiness. Thou dost strike right always on the
forehead! I know about this; I was five years in the army. I always
struck on the forehead or the belly, and I had not the worst time in
the world. But if any one struck me, I understood right away that he
must be a great person. In our Egypt may the gods never leave the land!
it is terribly crowded; town is near town, house is near house, man is
near man. Whoso wishes to turn in this throng must strike in the
forehead."

"Art Thou married?" asked the prince.

"Pfu! when I have a woman and place for a person and a half, I am
married; but for the rest of the time I am single. I have been in the
army, and I know that a woman is good, though not at all times. She is
in the way often."

"Perhaps Thou wouldst come to me for service? Who knows, wouldst Thou
be sorry to work for me?"

"With permission, worthiness, I noticed that Thou couldst lead a
regiment in spite of thy young face. But I enter the service of no man.
I am a free fisherman; my grandfather was, with permission, a shepherd
in Lower Egypt, our family comes of the Hyksos people. It is true that
dull Egyptian earth-tillers revile us, but I laugh at them. The earth-
tillers and the Hyksos, I say, worthiness, are like an ox and a bull.
The earth-tiller may go behind the plough or before it, but the Hyksos
will not serve any man, unless in the army of his holiness, that is
warrior life."

The boatman was in the vein and talked continually, but the prince
heard no longer. In his soul very painful questions grew louder and
louder, for they were new altogether. Were those mounds, then, around
which he had been sailing, on his property? A marvelous thing, he knew
not at all where his lands were nor what they looked like. So in his
name Dagon had imposed new rents on the people, and the active movement
on which he had been looking while moving along the shores was the
extortion of