s harp, sang, as if the words were
familiar to him:--

"He giveth snow like wool;
He scattereth the hoar-frost like ashes;
He casteth forth his ice like morsels;
Who can stand before his cold?
He sendeth forth his word, and melteth them;
He causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow."

"Always this '_He_,'" said one of the young soldiers to another.

"Yes," he replied; "and it was so in the beginning of the evening, when
we were above there."

"There is a strange difference between the two men, though the one plays
as well as the other, and the Greek speaks with quite as little foreign
accent as the Jew, and their subjects are the same."

"Yes," said the young Philistine harper; "if the Greek should sing one
of the Hebrew's songs, you would know he had borrowed it, in a moment."

"And so, if it were the other way."

"Of course," said their old captain, joining in this conversation.
"Homer, if you call him so, sings the thing made: David sings the maker.
Or, rather, Homer thinks of the thing made: David thinks of the maker,
whatever they sing."

"I was going to say that Homer would sing of cities; and David, of the
life in them."

"It is not what they say so much, as the way they look at it. The Greek
sees the outside,--the beauty of the thing; the Hebrew--"

"Hush!"

For David and his new friend had been talking too. Homer had told him of
the storm at sea they met a few days before; and David, I think, had
spoken of a mountain-tornado, as he met it years before. In the
excitement of his narrative he struck the harp, which was still in his
hand, and sung:--

"Then the earth shook and trembled,
The foundations of the hills moved and were shaken,
Because He was wroth;
There went up a smoke out of his nostrils,
And fire out of his mouth devoured;
It burned with living coal.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down,
And darkness was under his feet;
He rode upon a cherub and did fly,
Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his resting-place,
His pavilion were dark waters and clouds of the skies;
At the brightness before him his clouds passed by,
Hail-stones and coals of fire.
The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
And the highest gave his voice;
Hail-stones and coals of fire.
Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them,
And he shot out his lightnings, and discom