was a sight to make the father's heart proud, as he presented himself ready for the journey and asked for directions and the parting blessing. How long it would be before the two would meet again! and how different the circumstances of the meeting!

Shechem was fifty-six miles northward from Hebron. The lad reached the place in safety, but his brothers and the flocks were not there. He was wandering about searching for them, when he was informed by a stranger that they were probably at Dothan, which was about fifteen miles. further northwardly, and to it he directed his steps. The brothers were there, and they recognized him at a distance, for his gay dress made him easily known;-that dress, flaunting even here before them, a token of the father's partiality and reminder of scenes at home!

"Behold, the dreamer cometh," they cried as they saw him; and the eyes of the young men meeting quickly as they turned toward each other, had in them an understood, deadly intent. It is said that the lion, when he has once tasted human blood, becomes by preference a man-eater; and these men,-some of them at least-had before this, made their hearts callous in scenes of carnage. The seeds of deadly feeling toward this young man had previously been sown in their hearts; he had already been informer against them; they looked upon him now as a spy come among them. It had previously needed but little to inflame them into a fatal purpose; the purpose was rapidly and almost simultaneously formed now; he was there alone with them; how easy it would be to kill him and carry report to their father that he had been destroyed by a wild beast. That was their quickly-formed determination, but Reuben interfered. He had a plan for cheating the others and rescuing Joseph, and then delivering him to his father, perhaps as an expiation for a terrible outrage on the feelings

of the latter in the case of Bilhah,' the concubine of Jacob. He therefore persuaded them, instead of killing their brother at once, to cast him into a pit, to leave him there to perish, as this would not be so obviously imbruing their hands in his blood. There was no water in the pit, and his own intentions were to come secretly afterward and rescue the lad.

Joseph came on in the brightness and joyousness of unsuspecting youth, glad to have the uncertainty of search over by finding them at last, and glad in the meeting. He was startled by the fierceness of looks bent upon him; he was seized; his coat was quickly torn off him with violence; there were few words from them, but these were deadly; he saw their purpose; he raised an anguished cry; he entreated;2 but he was helpless in the hands of infuriated men, deaf to all cries and lashing their hearts up into fresh rage and bloodier sentiments of revenge. They dragged him to the pit and cast him in; and then going off a sufficient distance, they sat down with such relish as they could have, to their customary meal.

Reuben was absenting himself from them now. Fearful probably that his manner, if he were to remain among them, might betray his purposes, he had gone off to quite a distant part of the grazing region, and was waiting there until the time for delivering his brother should come.

But deliverance came in a manner unexpected by him. While the nine brothers were at their meal, they saw approaching them a company of Ishmaelites, those restless wanderers over the country, sometimes nomads, sometimes traders, sometimes robbers, anything, indeed, that would accommodate itself to their fondness for a roving life. These men had spices from the region of Gilead, just eastward from this across the Jordan, and were bound for a

1 Gen. xxxv. 5.

2 See Gen. xlii. 21.

3 Gilead was famous for its balsams. See Jer. viii. 22; xlvi. 11.

market for their balsams in Egypt. As they were seen approaching, Judah suggested to his brethren that it would be better to make money by selling the brother, instead of letting him die in the pit; and in addition to the prospect of gain, some relentings appear to have seized on him; "for he is our brother," said Judah, "and our own flesh." The project was agreed to, and Joseph was drawn up and sold to the traders for twenty pieces of silver; and he was soon moving with them in a direction that must carry him far from his home.

Reuben, toward evening, returned to the pit; he found it empty! He rent his clothes in his extremity of distress. "The child is not," he cried; "and whither shall I go?”

There was still a terrible scene to be gone through by these guilty young men, and their hearts shrank from it with many misgivings. In the depths of their depravity they still had a reverence for their father, and they all could dread his curse. But a common interest now bound them to maintaining the lie which they had agreed upon, and they believed that they could trust each other in the bond of a common guilt. They killed a kid, and having dipped the gay garment of their brother in its blood, carried it to the tent at Hebron. Their words, on presenting themselves before their father, were few and cold and seem heartless; perhaps they dared not trust their guilty feelings to a longer address.

"This we have found," they said; "know now whether it be thy son's coat or no."

A start of horror; a look of recognition on the garment; a pang of agony at the sight of blood;-and the seeming truth was all revealed!

For many days he sat, all encased in his horror; days and nights were equal to him in their frightful gloom. “It is my son's coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces," he kept saying;-his own

garments rent now, and sackcloth upon him; all his children around trying to comfort him, but in vain.

"I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning," he muttered, in reply to all their attempts to console him; "I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning." Even the little child, given by his Rachel at the cost of her life, failed to bring him relief in his sorrow; its gentle, sprightly ways jarred harshly on him; he wanted no relief. His sons, with that guilty secret in them, stood around, silent, or essaying words of sympathy. Words and silence were alike to him.

CHAPTER XIX.

EGYPT.

N the mean while, the lad was on his way toward Egypt

IN

in company with his owners, and had his own griefs without any friends near him and without sympathy. Young people sometimes grow old in a few hours; and his recent experiences had been of a character to teach him a vast deal in a single point of time. Those flashing eyes, the concentrated wrath and inhumanity in those faces of his brothers, their stinging words in answer to his supplications, their cold, pitiless observance of his tears, their fury and determination, and then the conviction in his mind that all was hopeless, and that he, the helpless boy, was to be brutally murdered by those who should have been his best protectors, all this had been burnt into his soul, and left there its mark of hissing fire. It is not to be wondered, if this searing process reached also in some degree his affections for his father; for the perception of the father's indiscretion

in his partiality, carried so far as to send him off in this gay robe, rose now clearly before him, and he felt that a wrong had been done him even by this doting parent. To pet a child is always the surest way to make him selfish, exacting and inconsiderate of others; and this process had for years been going on in Joseph's heart. But a cruel blow had come. He awoke from its first stunning effects to find himself a slave, alone, without sympathy from others; but he was also a far wiser young man as regarded all the world and especially himself.

Their route lay transversely across the hill country, south and west of Dothan, and then to the great plain bordered by the Mediterranean; and thence on it, toward the south. As they travelled along, they had, at the end of a few days, on their left, the loftier table-land, amid which were embosomed the tents and the households where Joseph's father and the little Benjamin were living; and where, he thought, his brutal, older brothers might be now with their false tales. Feelings of affection for the loving parent filled the boy's eyes and made them overflow; and yet with them was mingled some sentiment of condemnation toward the indiscreet cause of all these sufferings. Perhaps, in his new distrust of all men, he queried whether the absent boy would not soon be forgotten by all at home? At all events, that home was to him now a shut-off world. The lad soon began to look bravely to the future, and to prepare himself for the new world of which he was to be a part. He had the hopefulness always belonging to youth ; he was good-looking, and had a bright, quick intellect; he was in a situation to impress discretion, and had just been through a lesson in which the want of it had been terribly shown. He determined to be cautious, prudent, watchful, and hopeful; what was best of all, he resolved to adhere to the God of his forefathers, respecting whom, his notions, it is true, were dark; but yet were sufficient to satisfy him that