aid unto her mistress. Would God my lord were
with the prophet that is in Samaria! for he would recover him of his
leprosy."_--2 KINGS v. 1-3

I think upon the whole that old stories are better than new ones; I
mean, stories of old times. It is perhaps because only the very best are
remembered while the poorer ones are forgotten, so that those which have
come down to us through past ages are the choice ones selected from a
great number that pleased people for a while, but not well nor long
enough to get fixed in their minds.

Of all old stories, I hardly know a better one than this of Naaman and
the little maid from Samaria. It is full of human nature; that is, it
shows that people acted and felt three thousand years ago just as they
do now: they were kind and sympathetic, and proud and grateful and
covetous and deceitful, just as people are nowadays. And the story has a
fine romantic setting; that is, its incidents take hold of our fancy and
charm us;--a little girl stolen in war and carried to a foreign country
and put into the house of a great general, who falls very ill and is
cured in a wonderful way, and so on. I think it will please us all to
hear it over again.

Syria and Israel stood to each other very much like Germany and
Switzerland. One was a great, rich country, with fine rivers like the
Rhine and Danube, and a capital city so beautiful that it was called
"the eye of the East"; while Israel was a small country, full of
mountains, and with only one small river that ran nearly dry in summer.
To tell the truth, Syria looked down on Israel, and--what is
worse--often made war on it. In those days war was even more cruel and
senseless than it is now; for it was not confined to the armies that
fought and captured one another, but extended to women and children, who
were often seized, carried away from their homes into the country of the
enemy, and made slaves. It is bad and senseless enough for men to stand
up and stab one another as they used to in old times, or shoot one
another as they do now; but to carry a mother away from her children, or
take a little girl away from her home and playmates and make a slave of
her, is something worse. But it was often done in those ancient days, as
you will learn when you read history, and the story of the siege of
Troy, which sprang out of stealing a beautiful woman.

There were frequent wars between Syria and Israel. Israel had once
conquered Syria, and Syria had bro