tself
cannot have been very brief, since in its course he became very dear and
familiar to Saul,--it will not seem that all these events could be
crowded into less than some twelve or fifteen years, or that he could
have been more than a lad of some sixteen years of age when Samuel's
hand smoothed the sacred oil on his clustering curls.

How life had gone with him till then, we can easily gather from the
narrative of Scripture. His father's household seems to have been one in
which modest frugality ruled. There is no trace of Jesse having
servants; his youngest child does menial work; the present which he
sends to his king when David goes to court was simple, and such as a man
in humble life would give--an ass load of bread, one skin of wine, and
one kid--his flocks were small--"a few sheep." It would appear as if
prosperity had not smiled on the family since the days of Jesse's
grandfather, Boaz, that "mighty man of wealth." David's place in the
household does not seem to have been a happy one. His father scarcely
reckoned him amongst his sons, and answers Samuel's question, if the
seven burly husbandmen whom he has seen are all his children, with a
trace of contempt as he remembers that there is another, "and, behold,
he keepeth the sheep." Of his mother we hear but once, and that
incidentally, for a moment, long after. His brothers had no love for
him, and do not appear to have shared either his heart or his fortunes.
The boy evidently had the usual fate of souls like his, to grow up in
uncongenial circumstances, little understood and less sympathised with
by the common-place people round them, and thrown back therefore all the
more decisively upon themselves. The process sours and spoils some, but
it is the making of more--and where, as in this case, the nature is
thrown back upon God, and not on its own morbid operation, strength
comes from repression, and sweetness from endurance. He may have
received some instruction in one of Samuel's schools for the prophets,
but we are left in entire ignorance of what outward helps to unfold
itself were given to his budding life.

Whatever others he had, no doubt those which are emphasized in the Bible
story were the chief, namely, his occupation and the many gifts which it
brought to him. The limbs, "like hinds' feet," the sinewy arms which
"broke a bow of steel," the precision with which he used the sling, the
agility which "leaped over a rampart," the health that glowed in