the country."

Now does one suppose for a moment that she obeyed the mandate of the
King? Of course not, if one is a student of the Bible, but if one is
not, I'll just say that she took them up through the skylight and hid
them, piling flax over them, and then she said innocently and
convincingly to the King's officers:

"There came two men unto me, but I wist not whence they were: And it
came to pass about the time of shutting of the gate, when it was dark,
that the men went out: pursue after them quickly; for ye shall
overtake them."

Then she went up on the roof and talked to the men like a lawyer. I
notice that these old women--I mean women of old--were all good
talkers, and they didn't speak like meek, passive, submissive girls
wrought up to sudden action by wrong, indignation or revenge, but they
spoke with a freedom, vigor and fluency that betokened everyday
practice.

St. Paul says that woman should "Keep silence," and that "they are
commanded to be under obedience," but he evidently had some
remarkable ideas upon this and other topics. Perhaps he never had read
the official records, and we know he was never married, and so we
don't censure him so much for his ignorance of female character,
having never had a wife, or, so far as we know, a love affair, for
what does a man born blind know about the sunshine, or the lightning's
awful flash, or one born deaf know of the pealing, clashing thunder?

The women of his day were no doubt obstreperous and extravagant, and
hence his famous but perfectly ineffectual teaching that they should
not "broider their hair, or wear gold or silver or costly array," and
that they shouldn't talk in meeting, and if they wanted to know
anything, ask their husbands, and drink of their intellectual
superiority. But to return.

So Rahab made the spies swear that when the doom of destruction fell
upon Jericho, she and her father and mother and all her
relations-in-law should be saved, and then she let them down from the
window of her house, which was very conveniently built upon the town
wall, with a scarlet rope.

So you see, by deceit, strategy, disobedience and a succession of neat
little lies, she thwarted the King, betrayed the city, and saved her
own precious self all at one fell swoop.

[Illustration: (She let them down from the window of her house.)]

When the walls of Jericho fell and childhood in its innocence,
ambitious manhood, fiery youth, despairing maidens and lo