been Chief of the Scribes, where now are his fellows? Have those whom he cherished in his court, and the poets who sought his favor when living, nothing to say of him when dying? Did no others in the realm share the heartache of the father?

They wrote his elegy, and voiced a universal wail when they sang

THE DIRGE OF SETI-MENEPHTAH.

O Fan-bearer at the right of the king,
Crown-prince in the grand hall of Seb,
Royal Scribe of truth!

Thy mouth and thy lips were full of health:
Thou wast in favor with the king all thy life.
O Horus, friend of things that are just!
Thou shalt dwell a thousand years on the earth,
Thou reposest upon the mountain

Whose mistress is on the west of Thebes, in the necropolis.

Thy soul is renewing itself among the living,
And mingling among the perfected spirits.
Descending into the divine bark, thou art not

pulsed,

Thou passest even to the jaws of the tomb; Thou art judged before the deity [Osiris ; Thou art proclaimed righteous].

re

Observe that the poets neither call him king nor imply that he had been such, but only "Fan-bearer" and "Crown-prince," and that after having passed the portal of the tomb and been weighed in the balance of the judgment hall of Osiris, they had no more to wish for him than all the beatitudes of the Egyptian Paradise. They assure him of a thousand years on earth by embalmment, which insured against a second death. And by "the living" they meant the departed, who were supposed scarcely to begin, and not to enjoy, life until they reached the Elysian Fields.

Menephtah, his father, owed his promotion to the throne not to personal merit, but to the removal of most of his elder brothers by death on the field of battle: it is safe to infer that he had kept himself far away from all such dangerous ground. On reaching the throne he had grown too old to learn how to wield the sword or to direct others in actual combat.

But he was an adept in the science of magic, and a believer in the great significance of dreams, visions, and the oracles of the gods. And whenever he was driven into a corner he managed to make superstition avail to extricate him without bodily harm.

When the Libyans, with their allies, were crossing his boundaries and marching on Memphis, he ought to have been at the head of the troops and in the forefront of the defensive works. But as the opposing expedition was about to set out, lo! by night he had a dream, which he naïvely related, to this effect:

Then his Majesty saw in a dream as it were a statue of the god Ptah standing in front of him so as to prevent the king from advancing. It was as high as . . . and it said to him, "Remain where you now are"; and giving him a scimiter, “Put away anxiety from your heart."

Thereupon his Majesty asked, "What am I to do?" And the god replied, "Let the cavalry in great numbers advance in front of the infantry to the cultivated land in the defiles of the nome of Pa-ari-sheps." And so it was done: Menephtah, the incompetent king, trembling with fear, held back clinging to the bank of the Nile, while his army, commanded by his generals, sallied out and won the victory without him.

Later, the goddess Isis appeared to him in another dream, complaining that her temple had been demolished; and this led to that rebellion of his foreign population that drove him to Ethiopia.

From the face of the combined forces of rebels and Jebusites he turned back, as he professed because, forsooth, after a priest had prophesied they were to conquer Egypt and hold it thirteen years, to contend with them would be to fight against the gods; whence, also, the return from Ethiopia at the end of twelve years.

Such inexperience in warfare and such shrinking from exposure to personal harm has some bearing on what he would do in the Exodus at the crossing of the sea: analogy indicates at least a probability.

Had his son been living, the father, now about eighty years of age, certainly again would not have left the bank of the Nile. But the warrior Seti-Menephtah lay motionless on his bier in the palace; and the cavalry, requiring a leader, must now be led forth by the venerable king himself. Though blinded by the shadow of death, though bleeding from his fresh wound of bereavement, though frenzied with rage against those who had brought calamity on him, he made ready his chariot, and all the chariots of Egypt, "The Cavalry of Pa-Rameses," and his army, and pursued after escaping Israel. When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel were sore afraid.

Did he follow them into the midst of the sea, leading his forces after him?

If he did, it was the first time in all his life that he led an attack. Judging from his constitutional cowardice and his record of absence from every field of hostilities, we may be sure he would have had another revelation from heaven sooner than risk his person by such a collision in such a place. For this, too, his feebleness unfitted him, and recent events had unnerved him. Undoubtedly, having brought his host up to the fugitives, remaining in camp

himself he sent his forces forward into the depths to bring Israel back.

And there, standing on the beach at the break of day, he saw the returning waters ingulf his troubled, baffled, mighty yet impotent hosts, and, as the day wore on, toss them up at his feet. Why should we expect the father to perish with the son? For him to live was the greater penalty; shall the less be required? Imagine him, as he furtively fled back to Zoan, unattended by a single one of the gallant charioteers who rode out with him, utterly crushed under multiplied horrors, to linger and suffer out a

retributive existence.

Just how long he continued to linger and suffer is unknown. His remaining days were devoted to the pardonable diversion of inscribing upon the monuments at Zoan mementos of him who was his pride, so darkly slain by the mysterious God of the Hebrews. For the sake of these we indulge no regrets that he was spared the sea. No doubt, too, during his last years he was diligently engaged in completing his sepulcher at Thebes. Though not to finish it entirely, he lived long enough to make it in extent and in style of decoration second only to the magnificent tomb of Setî I., his grandfather. Yet his mummy was not there as far back as classic times, when tourists from Italy and Greece left memoranda of pilgrimage in numbers on the spot.

Reference has been made to a single date recorded shortly before King Menephtah's decease. It was observed by Dr. Heinrich Brugsch at Thebes in 1853, and made note of as follows:

Here we meet with the ruins of a temple belonging to the era of Amenhotep III., containing many cartouches of the kings both of earlier and later time; and the remnants of a statue of Menephtah Hotephima, carved out of black granite, with its inscription whose highest date may be the year 33, the lowest not less than the year 25 of this king. ("Reiseberichte," s. 194.)

As we have followed his career, the Exodus and the death of his son must have occurred in the twenty-second or the twenty-third year of his reign: accordingly, if he died in the twentyfifth year of his reign, he had only two or three years more to live after those critical events; but if he endured to the thirty-third year of his reign, he had about ten to wear away. He must have been between eighty-five and ninetyfive years old when at length he was rejoined to his idol.

THE DIRGE OF MENEPHTAH.

Amen gave thy heart pleasure,
He gave thee a good old age,
A lifetime of pleasure followed thee:
Blessed was thy lip, sound thine arm,
Strong thine eye to see afar.
Thou hast been clothed in linen;
Thou hast guided thy horse and chariot
of gold with thy hand,

The Syrians and the Negroes marched before thee.
The whip in thy hand, yoked were the steeds;
A proof of what thou hast done -
Thou hast proceeded to thy boat of acacia wood,
A boat made of it before and behind;
Thou hast approached the Beautiful Tower
Which thou thyself made.

Thy mouth was full of wine, beer, bread, and flesh :

Cattle were slaughtered and wine opened.
The chief anointer anointed thee with balsam.
The sweet song was made before thee:
The superintendent of thy fields brought birds,
The fishermen brought fish;
Thy galleys came from Syria laden with good things;
Thy stable was full of horses;
Thine enemies were placed fallen:
Thy female slaves were strong.
Thou hast gone before the gods, the victor, the
Thy word no one opposed.
departed.

It is often asserted that the Egyptians naturally would not confess a misfortune, and that their antiquities afford no trace of the first-born son of Pharaoh brought low under the last of those ten judgments which liberated Israel. But may not such statements themselves be fallible? As in the example of the Oppressor's daughter, may not the monumental concealment of his son's son, who died for the freedom of God's chosen people, be due rather to our dullness of vision? Is not their ingenuous testimony on record, and waiting only for our unerring discernment?

John A. Paine.

W

HEN Colonel Kononovich (Kon-on-o'vitch) resigned his position as governor of the Kara (Kah-rah') penal establishment, in 1881, his place was taken by Major Potulof (Po'too-loff), who had previously been connected in some official capacity with the prison administration of the Nerchinsk (Nerchinsk) silver mines. Shortly after Potulof assumed command, all of the male political convicts, who then numbered about one hundred, were transferred to the new political prison erected by Colonel Kononovich at the Lower Diggings, where they were divided into gangs of twenty-five men each and shut up in four large kameras (kah'me-rahs). Their life, as described in letters surreptitiously written by some of them to their friends,1 was hard and hopeless, but not absolutely intolerable. They were allowed to exercise every day in the court-yard, they were permitted to receive small sums of money from their friends, they had in the prison a fairly good library consisting of books purchased by them or sent to them from European Russia, and they could amuse themselves occasionally by working with carpenter's or blacksmith's tools in a small shop situated in one corner of the court-yard. On the other hand, they were living under very bad sanitary conditions; some of them were kept night and day in handcuffs and leg-fetters; two or three of them were chained to wheelbarrows; those who still had possession of their mental faculties were forced to listen constantly to the babbling or the raving of their insane comrades; they were no longer allowed to diversify their monotonous existence by work in the gold placers; they were deprived of the privilege of enrollment in the free command at the expiration of their terms of probation; they were forbidden to communicate with their relatives; and their whole world was bounded by the high serrated wall of the prison stockade. That their life was a terribly hard one seems to have been admitted, even by the most indifferent of Siberian officials. In March, 1882, Governor-General Anuchin (An-noo'chin) made a "secret" report to the Tsar with 1 I have in my possession a number of these letters, and many of the facts set forth in the following pages have been derived from them. Although the letters themselves must be regarded, of course, as ex-parte testimony, they were not intended to excite public sympathy, nor to affect public opinion, since it was not supposed by the writers that they would ever obtain publicity. 2 It is a noteworthy fact, frankly admitted by the Governor-General, that out of 430 political offenders banished to Eastern Siberia, 217-or more than half

All of the state criminals belonging to the penalservitude class are held at the Kara gold mines under guard of a foot company of the Trans-Baikal [Bykahl'] Cossacks consisting of two hundred men. The sending of these criminals to work with the common convicts in the gold placers is impossible.3 To employ them in such work in isolation from the others is very difficult, on account of the lack of suitable working-places, their unfitness for hard physical labor, and the want of an adequate conthat unproductive hard labor, such as that emvoy. If to these considerations be added the fact ployed in other countries merely to subject the prisoner to severe physical exertion, is not practiced with us, it will become apparent that we have no hard labor for this class of criminals to perform; and the local authorities who are in charge of them, and who are held to strict accountability for escapes, are compelled, by force of circumstances, to limit under strict guard, employing them, occasionally, themselves to keeping such state criminals in prison in work within the prison court, or not far from it. Such labor has not the character of penal servitude, but may rather be regarded as hygienic. Immunity from hard labor, however, does not render the lot of state criminals an easy one. On the contrary, complete isolation and constant confinement to their own limited circle make their life unbearable. . . There have been a number of suicides among them, and within a few days one of them, Pozen, has gone insane. A number of others are in a mental condition very near to insanity. In accordance with an understanding that I have with the had been sent there without trial, and without even a pretense of judicial investigation. I submit this officially stated fact for the attentive consideration of the advocates of a Russo-American extradition treaty.

3 The Governor-General does not say why this was "impossible," nor does he try to explain the fact that although the politicals were constantly sent to the gold placers under Colonel Kononovich's management, no evil results followed, and not a single attempt was made to escape.