The brave, the stalwart, the bread-winners, were gone; and
yet the tax-gatherer would come and press for every impost--on the
onion-field, the date-palm, the dourha-field, and the clump of
sugar-cane, as though the young men, the toilers, were still there. The
old and infirm, the children, the women, must now double and treble their
labour. The old men must go to the corvee, and mend the banks of the Nile
for the Prince and his pashas, providing their own food, their own tools,
their own housing, if housing there would be--if it was more than
sleeping under a bush by the riverside, or crawling into a hole in the
ground, their yeleks their clothes by day, their only covering at night.
They sat like men without hope, yet with the proud, bitter mien of those
who had known good and had lost it, had seen content and now were
desolate.
Presently one--a lad--the youngest of them, lifted up his voice and began
to chant a recitative, while another took a small drum and beat it in
unison. He was but just recovered from an illness, or he had gone also in
chains to die for he knew not what, leaving behind without hope all that
he loved:
"How has the cloud fallen, and the leaf withered on the tree,
The lemon-tree, that standeth by the door.
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