tincts smouldering in their hearts should be allowed to escape the
general baking. But excuse us; our business is to state facts and not
to wonder or surmise.

[Illustration: (Lot's wife looked back.)]

From subsequent facts we suppose that Lot's wife sadly, perhaps
rebelliously, lingered, for we find the angels saying again:

"Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything till thou come
thither," and they escaped to the city of Zoar, "and the sun was risen
upon the face of the earth when Lot entered into Zoar."

"Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from
the Lord out of heaven."

But before the end Lot's "wife looked back from behind him and she
became a pillar of salt."

All the information we have of Mrs. Lot is exceedingly meager; only
one short sentence and two little clauses in other sentences; and yet
no figure of history, no creation of a poet's dream or artist's brush
since the world, wrapped in the laces of the twilight and the mists,
and rocked in the cradle of the first early morning of life, until the
present day, old in experience, wrinkled with care, heart-sick with
too much knowledge and laughing without mirth, stands out more
clearly before the world than Lot's wife--and why?

Because it has been supposed that she was very naughty.

In this world it is the wicked folks who get the glory and the
everlasting fame; the good people get the snubs, the crumbs, the
eternal oblivion.

The whole history of Lot's wife lies in the fact that she was told by
the angel of the Lord to do one thing, and she--didn't do it.

But that is characteristic of the women of old; they systematically
didn't do it if they were told to, and systematically did do it if
they were told not to.

And Madam Lot "became a pillar of salt," because of her disobedience,
and has stood through the centuries a warning statue to naughty
females; yes, more than that, for she has seemed a criminal whom just
vengeance caught in the very act and turned into a pillar of salt,
standing in the plain near Sodom, against a background of shame, crime
and punishment, that the eyes of the world of women might look upon
forever, and be afraid.

But in this day and age we are beginning to see that in Lot's wife it
was a case of mistaken identity, and instead of being a criminal she
was a great and good woman, and although the "pillar of salt"
commemorates an act of dire disobedience, it also extols a loving
he