der, beautifully curved
arms, went to the well behind the old sycamore or to the side of the
neighboring canal.

This morning, as on every other working-day, a pied ox with a large hump
was turning the wheel that raised the water. It watered the land, though
the owner of the cattle intended to leave it on the morrow; but the
slave who drove it had no thought beyond the present and, as no one
forbade him, moistened as he was wont the grass for the foe into whose
hands it was to fall.

Hours elapsed ere the advancing multitude reached the camp, and Miriam
who stood describing to Amminadab, whose eyes were no longer keen enough
to discern distant objects, what was passing below, witnessed many an
incident from which she would fain have averted her gaze.

She dared not frankly tell the old man what she beheld, it would have
clouded his joyous hope.

Relying, with all the might of an inspired soul upon the God of
her fathers and his omnipotence, she had but yesterday fully shared
Amminadab's confidence; but the Lord had bestowed upon her spirit the
fatal gift of seeing things and hearing words incomprehensible to all
other human beings. Usually she distinguished them in dreams, but they
often came to her also in solitary hours, when she was deeply absorbed
by thoughts of the past or the future.

The words Ephraim had announced to Hosea in her name, as a message from
the Most High, had been uttered by unseen lips while she was thinking
under the sycamore of the exodus and the man whom she had loved from her
childhood--and when that day, between midnight and morning, she again
sat beneath the venerable tree and was overpowered by weariness, she
had believed she heard the same voice. The words had vanished from
her memory when she awoke, but she knew that their purport had been
sorrowful and of ill omen.

Spite of the vagueness of the monition, it disturbed her, and the
outcries rising from the pastures certainly were not evoked by joy
that the people had joined her brothers and the first goal of their
wanderings had been successfully gained, as the old man at her side
supposed; no, they were the furious shouts of wrathful, undisciplined
men, wrangling and fighting with fierce hostility on the meadow for a
good place to pitch their tents or the best spot at the wells or on the
brink of the canals to water their cattle.

Wrath, disappointment, despair echoed in the shouts, and when her gaze
sought the point whence they