“I don’t think that was a bit of fun.”
“You would have,” said Budge, “if you’d always had to work like everything. Don’t you ’member how once when mamma made you work, an’ carry away all the blocks you brought up on the piazza from the new buildin’? You walked ’way off to the village to get rid of it.”
“Ye—es,” drawled Toddie, “but I knew I’d be rided back when dey came to look for me. Den what did they do?”
“They started to travel to a nice country that the Lord had told Moses about, an’ they got along till they came to a pretty big ocean where there wasn’t any ferry-boats. I don’t see what Moses took ’em to such a place as that for, unless the Lord wanted to show ’em that no ferry-boats could get the best of Him, when all of a sudden they saw an awful lot of dust bein’ kicked up behind ’em, an’ somebody said that Pharaoh was a-comin’.”
“Should fink he’d seen ’nough of ’em,” said Toddie. “Did he come down to the boat to wave his hanafitch good-by at ’em?”
“No, he knew there wasn’t any boats there, an’ so he came to take ’em back again an’ make ’em work some more.”
“Should fink he’d be afraid de Lord would kill him next.”
“P’r’aps he did; but then, you see, he was awful lazy, an’ didn’t like to work for himself; papa says there’s lots of folks that would rather be killed than do any work.”
“Den what d’s de lazy folks do? They can’t catch any Izzyrelites, can they?”
“No,” said Budge, “but they can do what the Izzyrelites done themselves—they borrow other people’s money. Well, when the folks saw that ’twas Pharaoh a-comin’, they began to grunt, an pitch into poor Moses, an’ told him he ought to be ashamed of hisself to bring ’em away off there to be killed, when they might have died in Egypt without havin’ to walk so far. But Moses said: ‘Shut your mouth, will you? The Lord’s doin’ this job.’ Then the Lord said: ‘Moses, lift up your cane an’ point across the water with it!’s An’ the minute Moses done that, the water of that ocean went way up on one side, and way up on the other side—just like it does in the bathtub sometimes when we’re splashin’, you know—and there was a path right through the bottom of that ocean. An’ the people just skooted right along it!”