was in Goshen, sought by every means in their power to placate them with gifts and bribes. Nothing that the Hebrews asked of them, and they asked freely as Moses himself had bidden them, was refused. They accepted these things not as an indulgence but as a right, wages long owing for the evils they had suffered and their centuries of toil.

As ordained by Pharaoh, his overseers and taskmasters had cruelly increased the labour and the torments of the Hebrew gangs that worked under them, until they were almost beyond human endurance. But the old sullenness and apathy had vanished. Some divine secret hope seemed now to make their sufferings of no account. They toiled on as if all resentment had been clean forgotten.

An ancient song of Canaan, wild and plaintive and sweet, had spread from mouth to mouth. To the Egyptians it was meaningless, and yet as they hearkened, a hidden menace jarred its strains. It haunted them and they feared the sound of it. But when even speech was forbidden between slave and slave, by the light on their faces they seemed to be still singing in their hearts. A hush of dread and expectancy was over the land.

On the tenth evening of the new Hebrew year so brightly shone a great gibbous moon that the light of day waned without interval of darkness into the light of night. On this day, as Moses had commanded through the elders, every householder in Israel had set apart from among his few sheep or goats a lamb or a kid of one year old, the best he had, the firstborn of its mother, and without any defect or blemish. This too was a sacred symbol, for ever afterwards the firstborn among Israel were to be accounted sacred to the Lord.

This firstborn lamb was intended for the feast that was to be partaken of by himself and his whole household four days afterwards, the feast day appointed by the Lord. And if any household, owing to the fewness of its members or its children, were too small to need a lamb for its own use only, it was to share one with its neighbour.

That day, longed for beyond all telling, dawned at length. The Hebrews set out as usual from their quarters to the brickyards, the quarries and the great temple that was then in building. It was a day of furious heat, airless and ominous. The overseers of the gangs, fearful of laying before Pharaoh misgivings so vague that they could find no proof of them, were nevertheless convinced that the Hebrews were secretly plotting against them, and barbarously drove them on. Many swooned with exhaustion by the way, and died, untended, where they fell. But no cruelty devised either by hatred or terror could now extort from the Hebrews a single rebellious word or action: not even so much as a groan of pain or of weariness.

At length the sultry hours drew towards evening, and the gangs were dismissed from their toil. For the last time the hewers of stone laid aside their picks and their mallets, and the makers of bricks their waterskins, their shovels and moulds; and all turned homeward. The gangmasters and overseers withdrew to their own quarters; and the quarries and works, where never more was any son of Israel to be seen at slavish toil again, lay idle in the wild colours of the declining sun.

At the brief hour that comes between sunset and the dark every householder in Goshen took the lamb that he had set apart and slaughtered it for the feast. Then he dipped into its blood a bunch of hyssop or marjoram—a wild, sweet, aromatic herb that grew freely on the walls of almost every dwelling in Goshen—and he sprinkled the blood on the door of his house, on its posts and on its lintel. The doom foretold to Moses by Jehovah was at hand. The angel of death, whose face is veiled, would be abroad in Egypt that night, and no human dwelling would be spared from his visitation except only those thus with the blood of the lamb. After the sprinkling, sprinkled the door was shut and made fast. From this moment until the hour appointed by Moses, no man in Goshen ventured abroad; none went out and none came in.

When night fell, a profound quietude lay over the settlements of the Hebrews. The dewy moon-bright air was chill and sweet with springing grass and flower. No light gleamed out from any window of the mean