at all, but was held upright to a stout post by an iron ring about the
neck and a rope about the waist. He put out a finger and touched the
face. It was cold.

"Thy son?"

"They stoned him with these stones. His wife stood by."

"The Syrians?"

"The Syrians. They went northward before noon, taking her. The plain
is otherwise burnt than on the day when I sought across it for his sake
to Carmel."

"Well did King David entreat the hand of the Lord rather than the hand
of man. I had not heard of thy son's marrying."

"Five years ago he went down with a gift to Philistia, to them that
sheltered us in the famine. He brought back this woman."

"She betrayed him?"

"He heard her speak with a Syrian, and fled up the hill. From the
little window in the wall--see, it smokes yet--she called and pointed
after him. And they ran and overtook him. With this iron they fastened
him, and with these stones they stoned him. Man of God, I am thinking
that God was wiser than thou or I."

The old man stood musing, and touched the heap of stones gently, stone
after stone, with the end of his staff.

"He was wiser."

_Cling--cling--clink!_

Miriam had taken up a stone, and with it was hammering feebly,
impotently, upon the rivets in the iron band.

As the sun dropped below Carmel the prophet cast down his staff and
stretched out two groping hands to help her.

"ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER"

Early last Fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife. The woman
went first, and the husband took a chill at her grave's edge, when he
stood bareheaded in a lashing shower. The loose earth crumbled under
his feet, trickled over, and dropped on her coffin-lid. Through two
long nights he lay on his bed without sleeping and listened to this
sound. At first it ran in his ears perpetually, but afterwards he heard
it at intervals only, in the pauses of acute suffering. On the seventh
day he died, of pleuro-pneumonia; and on the tenth (a Sunday) they
buried him. For just fifty years the dead man had been minister of the
Independent chapel on the hill, and had laid down his pastorate two
years before, on his golden wedding-day. Consequently there was a
funeral sermon, and the young man, his successor, chose II. Samuel,
i. 23, for his text--"Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
death they were not divided." Himself a newly-married man, he waxed
dithyrambic on the sustained affection and accord of the departed