her maidens, for she turned with a smile to the kneeling girl, and said
simply, "Go."

With light feet and a beating heart Miriam sped away to the spot where
her mother was hiding, calling to her in Hebrew as she went to come
quickly. The princess and her maidens looked with amusement at the
Hebrew woman as she came swiftly forward and knelt before them; and the
whole of the mother's little plot was clearly seen in her blushing
cheeks and tear-filled eyes. This clever little slave girl had found a
Hebrew nurse very, very quickly!

"Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will give you your
wages," the princess said to the kneeling woman; and she smiled again
when the little child ceased weeping and held up his little chubby arms
as soon as this Hebrew woman's face bent over him. She was indeed the
mother, but the princess would tell no one, for thenceforth the boy was
to be as her own child.

When the little child grew up this good princess took him into her
lovely palace to be her son; and she called him Moses, because that
name meant that he was taken out of the water. And there is a pretty
story told about this same princess by an old Jewish writer, though it
is not to be found in our Bible.

He says that the princess was so proud of the boy that one day she
brought the little fellow to her father the king, that he might see how
beautiful he was. The king took off his golden crown and put it on the
child's curly head; but the little boy took it off again, and putting
it upon the ground, tried to stand upon it, which amused the king and
his courtiers very much. The old Jewish writer says that this showed
how the little boy would one day force this king to set free the
Hebrews, which indeed he did, as the Bible tells us. For Moses became,
when he grew up, the great leader of the Israelites, who led them out
of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan, where in time, after much
fighting, they founded a kingdom of their own.

RUTH THE GLEANER.

In the days before there was a king in Israel a woman called Naomi,
whose name means "the pleasant," lived in the little village of
Bethlehem; and when at one time food was scarce, she left the place
with her husband and two sons, and went over into the land of Moab,
where there was plenty of food to eat.

For ten years she lived in that land, and there her sons married
Moabite girls. Then heavy trouble came upon Naomi, for she lost not
only her husband,