He filled
Israel's fields with cattle, the hills with Hebrew flocks, the valleys
with corn. Alas! Had it not been--but, nay, Jehovah was not yet
ready. He had chosen Moses to lead Israel."
The old woman paused and sighed. After a silence she continued:
"Thy father fell heir to the most of his wealth, but not to his
immunity. With a heart as great as his sire's he continued the good
work. He wedded thy mother, the daughter of another free Israelite,
and in his love for her, never was man more happy. In the midst of his
hope and his peace an enemy betrayed him to Rameses, the Incomparable
Pharaoh. And Rameses remembered not his father's covenant. So Maai's
lands, his flocks, his home, were taken; thou, but new-born, and thy
mother with her people were sent to the brick-fields--himself and his
brothers to the mines; and in a few years thou wast all that was left
of thy father's house."
The effect of this recital on the young Israelite was deep. Anguish,
wrath, and the pain that intensifies these two, helplessness, inflamed
her soul. The story was not entirely new to her; she had heard it, a
part at a time, in her childhood; but now, her understanding fully
developed, the whole history of her family's wrongs appealed to her in
all its actual savagery.
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