ns "Princess."

Abraham was sitting in his tent one hot day, when three men stood by
him. They were strangers, and Abraham asked them to rest beneath the
tree, and bathe their feet, while he brought them food. So Sarah made
cakes, and a tender calf was cooked, and these with butter, and milk,
were set before the men. But they were not men of this world; they
were angels, and they had come to tell Abraham and Sarah once more that
their little child was sure to come. Then the angels went away, but
one of them, who must have been the Lord Himself in an angel's form,
stopped to tell Abraham that He was going to destroy Sodom and
Gomorrah, because the people who lived there were so very wicked, and
Abraham prayed Him to spare them if even ten good men could be found in
them, for he remembered that Lot lived in Sodom. But the Lord never
forgets. The two angels went to Sodom and stayed with Lot until
morning, when they took him and all his family outside the city, and
then the Lord said to him, "Escape for thy life--look not behind thee,
neither stay thou in all the plain."

[Illustration: The three strangers]

And the Lord hid them in the little town of Zoar, while a great rain of
fire fell upon the wicked cities of the plain, until they became a heap
of ashes. Only Lot's wife looked back to see the burning cities, and
she became a pillar of salt.

The next morning when Abraham looked from Hebron down toward the cities
of the plain, a great smoke was rising from them like the smoke of a
furnace.

At last the Lord's promise to Abraham and Sarah came true. A little
son was born to them, and they called him Isaac. They were very happy,
for though Abraham was a hundred years old, no child had ever been sent
them.

When he was about a year old they made a great feast for him, and all
brought gifts and good wishes, yet the little lad Ishmael, the son of
Hagar, Sarah's servant, mocked at Isaac. Sarah was angry, and told her
husband that Hagar and her boy must be sent away. So he sent them out
with only a bottle of water and a loaf of bread; for God had told
Abraham to do as Sarah wished him to do, and He would take care of
little Ishmael, and make him the father of another nation.

When the water was gone, and the sun grew very hot, poor Hagar laid her
child under a bush to die, for she was very lonely and sorrowful.
While she hid her eyes and wept, saying,

"Let me not see the death of the child," she heard a v