son and afterward taken out and made
prime minister over all that land; how during the seven years of plenty
he laid up corn for the seven years of famine which followed, and
afterward his father and his brethren--in all the seventy persons who
constituted Jacob's family--came down into Egypt to be fed. After two
hundred and fifty years this family had increased until it numbered
nearly two millions of people. Pharaoh had made slaves of them, and
compelled them to work in the brickyards of Egypt. The task-masters were
very cruel. They beat them with whips, and demanded excessive labor from
them. These people were the chosen people of God, and their voice was
lifted to God their Father for deliverance from all the wrongs which
they suffered. God heard their prayer, and raised up Moses to deliver
them out of Egyptian bondage.

When Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh to request him to let the Children
of Israel go from Egypt to the land of Canaan, which God had promised to
Abraham and to his seed after him, Pharaoh would not consent to let them
go. He was a proud, wicked king, and God sent ten great plagues upon him
and his country, to humble him and cause him to do as God desired that
he should do.

In the first plague the rivers were turned into blood. This plague
lasted seven days, and at the end of that time Moses stretched forth his
rod, and all the rivers and ponds and lakes of water brought forth great
frogs throughout all the land. They came, not by hundreds, but by
thousands and millions, until the frogs covered all that land. They were
in the houses of all the people. The king's servants were busy sweeping
and carrying them out of the palace, and yet they stole into the rooms,
and at night when the king would go to lie down he would find these
frogs in his bed-chamber and upon his bed. When his bakers went to make
bread for the king, they would find them in the bread-troughs in which
they kneaded or mixed the bread, and in the ovens where they baked the
bread. The frogs were everywhere in the palace and in the huts of the
common people; upon the streets and in the roads; wherever the people
walked they stepped upon them, and the king's carriage could not be
driven through the streets without crushing thousands of them. The
plague was so great that Pharaoh sent for Moses and Aaron, and entreated
them to call upon their God that He would remove the frogs; and when God
heard the prayer of Moses and Aaron He caused the