Fair to Look Upon

by Mary Belle Freeley

STORY OF SOME WOMEN AND A BABY.

So the king was balked by the Hebrew midwives and the Jews continued to "increase abundantly and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them."

And the king, fearing the multitude of the Jews, again pitted himself against the fecundity and rebellion of the women, and issued the cruel but famous command:

"And Pharaoh charged all the people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive."

And shortly after that, one night when all the Egyptians slept, and only the stars, the moon and the winds were awake, in the silence and the silvery gloom, a baby boy came to a daughter of Levi, and "when she saw him that he was a goodly child" she quietly determined that no murderous hand should ever toss him in the rolling river, or check the breath on his sweet lips; "and she hid him three months."

I don't know how she did it, but perhaps when he was crying with all a baby's vigor for his supper the embryo diplomat in his heart shrewdly caught the meaning in his mother's warning "hush, sh!" and, king and tyrant tho' he was, he knew "that there was a greater than he," and stilled his cries. Perhaps when the colic gripped his vitals he bore the pain in unflinching silence, if he heard an Egyptian footstep near the door. Perhaps he stopped his gooing and cooing in his hidden nest, and held his very breath in fear, when he heard an Egyptian voice in the house.

And all these three months he had been growing plump, and strong and healthy, and I suppose he became a little reckless, or perchance he began to think he knew more than his mother did about it, and wouldn't keep still. Anyway, whatever was the matter I don't know, but there came a day when "she could no longer hide him," and then she laid a plot to baffle the king, defeat death and save the child.

Being an ambitious woman as well as a loving mother, she was not content that he should be as other children, forced "to serve with rigor" and his life made "bitter with hard bondage in mortar and brick and in all manner of service of the field." I presume she thought he was a little more beautiful and more clever than any child that ever lived before, for we all do that when a baby comes without an invitation and often against our most urgent wishes, and nestling in our arms says, without uttering a word: "I've come to stay and I want my supper; I'm hungry, for the journey has been long and dark—and why don't you make haste?"

Perhaps she had caught the fire of the future statesman in his dark eye; perhaps she had heard the ring of sublimity in the melodious voice that afterward said "Honor thy father and thy mother." Perhaps she had seen the shrewdness of the future great diplomat in his maneuvers to have his baby way, and being a bright woman she set her wits to work to defy the king, defeat his law and elude the cruel vigilance of the Egyptian spies; and she conceived a plot which for boldness of thought and shrewdness of execution stands unsurpassed. She would not save him to live the toilsome, slavish life of the Jews. She sighed for all the advantages of the Egyptians. She lifted her ambitious eyes to the royal household itself, and in spite of the accident of birth, in spite of king and law and hatred, in spite of the fatal fact that he was a dark-eyed, dark-haired Jew, she vowed he should mingle with royal nabobs, laugh and thrive and prosper under the very eye of his enemy the king, be clothed in purple and fine linen, skilled in all the arts and learned in all the sciences of the Egyptians; and she was clever enough to see at a glance that in this almost hopeless scheme she must have accomplices.