Cruelly as he was altered, Phanes recognized his old friend at once, ordered his feet to be washed and his head anointed, gave him wine and meat to revive his strength, took his rags off and laid a new chiton over his emaciated, but still sinewy, frame.

Aristomachus received all in silence; and when the food and wine had given him strength to speak, began the following answer to Phanes’ eager questions.

On the murder of Phanes’ son by Psamtik, he had declared his intention of leaving Egypt and inducing the troops under his command to do the same, unless his friend’s little daughter were at once set free, and a satisfactory explanation given for the sudden disappearance of the boy.  Psamtik promised to consider the matter.  Two days later, as Aristomachus was going up the Nile by night to Memphis, he was seized by Egyptian soldiers, bound and thrown into the dark hold of a boat, which, after a voyage of many days and nights, cast anchor on a totally unknown shore.  The prisoners were taken out of their dungeon and led across a desert under the burning sun, and past rocks of strange forms, until they reached a range of mountains with a colony of huts at its base.  These huts were inhabited by human beings, who, with chains on their feet, were driven every morning into the shaft of a mine and there compelled to hew grains of gold out of the stony rock.  Many of these miserable men had passed forty years in this place, but most died soon, overcome by the hard work and the fearful extremes of heat and cold to which they were exposed on entering and leaving the mine.

[Diodorus (III. 12.) describes the compulsory work in the gold mines with great minuteness.  The convicts were either prisoners taken in war, or people whom despotism in its blind fury found it expedient to put out of the way.  The mines lay in the plain of Koptos, not far from the Red Sea.  Traces of them have been discovered in modern times.  Interesting inscriptions of the time of Rameses the Great, (14 centuries B. C.) referring to the gold-mines, have been found, one at Radesich, the other at Kubnn, and have been published and deciphered in Europe.]

“My companions,” continued Aristomachus, “were either condemned murderers to whom mercy had been granted, or men guilty of high treason whose tongues had been cut out, and others such as myself whom the king had reason to fear.  Three months I worked among this set, submitting to the strokes of the overseer, fainting under the fearful heat, and stiffening under the cold dews of night.  I felt as if picked out for death and only kept alive by the hope of vengeance.  It happened, however, by the mercy of the gods, that at the feast of Pacht, our guards, as is the custom of the Egyptians, drank so freely as to fall into a deep sleep, during which I and a young Jew who had been deprived of his right hand for having used false weights in trade, managed to escape unperceived; Zeus Lacedaemonius and the