schools the masters had a difficulty in training the young and keeping
down their passion for amusements. When oral exhortation failed of
success, the cane was used pretty smartly in its place; for the wise men
of the land had a saying that 'a boy's ears grow on his back.'"[5]

Herodotus tells us how gaily the Egyptians kept their festivals,
thousands of the common people--men, women, and children
together--crowding into the boats, which at such times covered the Nile,
the men piping, and the women clapping their hands or striking their
castanets, as they passed from town to town along the banks of the
stream, stopping at the various landing-places, and challenging the
inhabitants to a contest of good-humoured Billingsgate. From the
monuments we see how the men sang at their labours--here as they trod
the wine-press or the dough-trough, there as they threshed out the corn
by driving the oxen through the golden heaps. In one case the words of a
harvest-song have come down to us:

"Thresh for yourselves," they sang, "thresh for yourselves,
O oxen, thresh for yourselves, for yourselves--
Bushels for yourselves, bushels for your masters!"

Their light-hearted drollery sometimes found vent in caricature. The
grand sculptures wherewith a king strove to perpetuate the memory of his
warlike exploits were travestied by satirists, who reproduced the scenes
upon papyrus as combats between cats and rats. The amorous follies of
the monarch were held up to derision by sketches of a harem interior,
where the kingly wooer was represented by a lion, and his favourites of
the softer sex by gazelles. Even in serious scenes depicting the trial
of souls in the next world, the sense of humour breaks out, where the
bad man, transformed into a pig or a monkey, walks off with a comical