except in the poetic account in the Psalms, and poetry is not. necessarily history. At any rate his mummy was found in 1898, and on July 8, 1907, was unwrapped. His bald head with only a fringe of white hair around the base of the skull, and the loss of all his teeth except one upper front show him to have been an old man. There is something rather imperial in his hawk-like nose, and yet how has the mighty fallen, since he had his memorable contest with Moses, when he stubbornly refused to let God's people go. In the long run he was no match for him who as a child was cradled in the ark of bulrushes on the bosom of the Nile. He who for many years held the Hebrews in bitter bondage is now himself a bond slave in the hands of the archæologist, who has stripped the old tyrant for the unpitying gaze of every tourist.

In the same Museum where he now lies stands a stone ten feet high, upon which he wrote, and which Dr. Flinders Petrie unearthed at Thebes in 1895-6. On it three different Pharaohs had successively cut and erased inscriptions, when this Pharaoh of the Exodus coveted it for a temple he was building. He turned its thrice-inscribed face to the wall, and on its back which he made its front he engraved a battle hymn containing this statement, "Israel is crushed, is without seed." Surely the cruel Pharaoh, with whom Scripture makes us familiar, did crush the Israelites in making their lives so unendurable that they were forced to seek relief in flight, in the now historic exodus. A confirmation here do we have of the Biblical representation of the Egyptian bondage, as the very stone cries out. "Israel is crushed." The producing of this Israel Stela is like Brutus with his eloquence making

"The stones of Rome to rise in mutiny."

THE NEW YOHN PUBLIC LIBA.

ACTOR · ཁ TILDIN KOUNG

Had Menephtah, who wanted to destroy the Hebrews, known that he was to assist in the establishing of their sacred writings, he might well have uttered the prayer of Macbeth, when before the murder of Duncan he, according to our great English dramatist, thus besought the earth:

"Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout."

Verily we have here one of Shakespeare's "sermons in stones. In 1916 the University of Pennsylvania announced through the daily press the uncovering of Menephtah's palace at Memphis. It contained a museum of antiquities which he had gathered, never imagining that he himself was to be an antiquity in a larger museum of our day so distant from his time. It contained also the very throne-room in which Moses and Aaron must have appeared before him, pleading with him to let their people go, while he at their repeated importunities only hardened his heart.

There is one Pharaoh whom we would like most of all to see, and that is Rameses the Second or Great, the Pharaoh preeminently of the Oppression. In the land of Goshen, 80 miles from Cairo toward Suez, is one of the "store-cities," which he made his Hebrew slaves to build, and this has been unearthed in our generation. The inscriptions prove that it is Pithom, which consists of brick walls 22 feet thick in the form of a square, and 650 feet along each side. The bricks are of a varying quality, confirming what the inspired record. says, that while the workmen sometimes had straw, they again did not have. They were driven to great straits, when they had to hunt to get even "stubble for straw." When they did not have so much as this, they had to go on making up the poorest kind of material. Nor could they lessen the

supply of the finished product, at whatever disadvantage they labored. They had to furnish just so many bricks each day, or they were scourged by the heartless taskmasters. Very tangible proof in all this do we have of the truthfulness of Holy Writ, and of the reality once of the oppressing Pharaoh. Then there are all his statues and temples to be seen everywhere.

But why should we talk of his massive works? When Antony in his funeral oration had made the multitudes weep over "Caesar's vesture wounded," he instantly rose to his climax, as he exclaimed,

Look ye here,

Here is himself, marred, as you see, with traitors." Similarly we need not speak of the monuments of Rameses, for here is himself, his actual mummy in the Cairo Museum. Stand up and show thyself, thou Pharaoh of the Oppression. How tall are you, over six feet? So you are, and otherwise you are exactly as you have been described, with forehead "low and narrow," with small eyes, aquiline nose, ears pierced for jewelry, broad shoulders. That will do; lie down again in your glass case. You do not want to? Very well, stand where you are, till we get a good square look at you. How do you like being at the mercy of others, no longer your own master, taken from your tomb in the valley of the kings, hidden in a pit, removed from that and freighted on a Nile steamer to be a curiosity in a museum, how are you pleased with the situation, you old rascal?

To think that we can look into the identical face, which people long before the Christian era used to gaze upon with awe! The "quaint conceit" of Horace Smith's poem comes to mind: