a charioteer, and to make as merry over the discomforts of a military occupation as it had formerly been the fashion to extol its glory and profitableness.  These scholastic exercises represented the future officer dragged as a child to the barracks, “the side-lock over his ear.—­He is beaten and his sides are covered with scars,—­he is beaten and his two eyebrows are marked with wounds,—­he is beaten and his head is broken by a badly aimed blow; he is stretched on the ground” for the slightest fault, “and blows fall on him as on a papyrus,—­and he is broken by the stick.”  His education finished, he is sent away to a distance, to Syria or Ethiopia, and fresh troubles overtake him.  “His victuals and his supply of water are about his neck like the burden of an ass,—­and his neck and throat suffer like those of an ass,—­so that the joints of his spine are broken.—­He drinks putrid water, keeping perpetual guard the while.”  His fatigues soon tell upon his health and vigour:  “Should he reach the enemy,—­he is like a bird which trembles.—­Should he return to Egypt,—­he is like a piece of old worm-eaten wood.—­He is sick and must lie down, he is carried on an ass,—­while thieves steal his linen,—­and his slaves escape.”  The charioteer is not spared either.  He, doubtless, has a moment of vain-glory and of flattered vanity when he receives, according to regulations, a new chariot and two horses, with which he drives at a gallop before his parents and his fellow-villagers; but once having joined his regiment, he is perhaps worse off than the foot-soldier.  “He is thrown to the ground among thorns:—­a scorpion wounds him in the foot, and his heel is pierced by its sting.—­When his kit is examined,—­his misery is at its height.”  No sooner has the fact been notified that his arms are in a bad condition, or that some article has disappeared, than “he is stretched on the ground—­and overpowered with blows from a stick.”  This decline of the warlike spirit in all classes of society had entailed serious modifications in the organisation of both army and navy.  The native element no longer predominated in most battalions and on the majority of vessels, as it had done under the XVIIIth dynasty; it still furnished those formidable companies of archers—­the terror of both Africans and Asiatics—­and also the most important part, if not the whole, of the chariotry, but the main body of the infantry was composed almost exclusively of mercenaries, particularly of the Shardana and the Qahaka.  Ramses began his reforms by rebuilding the fleet, which, in a country like Egypt, was always an artificial creation, liable to fall into decay, unless a strong and persistent effort were made to keep it in an efficient condition.  Shipbuilding had made considerable progress in the last few centuries, perhaps from the impulse received through Phoenicia, and the vessels turned out of the dockyards were far superior to those constructed under Hatshopsitu.  The general outlines of the hull remained the same,