mechanically, in a low voice, uttered the words of blessing; and then
once more fixed his gaze on the dingy floor, and pursued his own
reflections.

Some hours since he had come hither, obedient to the orders of Ameni,
to impress on the princess that she had defiled herself by touching a
paraschites, and could only be cleansed again by the hand of the priests.

He had crossed the threshold of the paraschites most reluctantly, and the
thought that he, of all men, had been selected to censure a deed of the
noblest humanity, and to bring her who had done it to judgment, weighed
upon him as a calamity.

In his intercourse with his friend Nebsecht, Pentaur had thrown off many
fetters, and given place to many thoughts that his master would have held
sinful and presumptuous; but at the same time he acknowledged the
sanctity of the old institutions, which were upheld by those whom lie had
learned to regard as the divinely-appointed guardians of the spiritual
possessions of God's people; nor was he wholly free from the pride of
caste and the haughtiness which, with prudent intent, were inculcated in
the priests. He held the common man, who put forth his strength to win a
maintenance for his belongings by honest bodily labor--the merchant--the
artizan--the peasant, nay even the warrior, as far beneath the godly
brotherhood who strove for only spiritual ends; and most of all he
scorned the idler, given up to sensual enjoyments.

He held him unclean who had been branded by the law; and how should it
have been otherwise? These people, who at the embalming of the dead
opened the body of the deceased, had become despised for their office of
mutilating the sacred temple of the soul; but no paraschites chose his