urn their steps.
His blessing and that of our God will attend thy every step."

As Eliab uttered the last words, Hosea bowed his head as if inviting
invisible hands to be laid upon it. Then he thanked the old man and
asked, in subdued tones, whether all the Hebrews had willingly obeyed
the summons to leave house and lands.

His aged wife clasped her hands, exclaiming: "Oh no, my lord, certainly
not. What wailing and weeping filled the air before their departure!
Many refused to go, others fled, or sought some hiding-place. But all
resistance was futile. In the house of our neighbor Deuel--you know
him--his young wife had just given birth to their first son. How was she
to fare on the journey? She wept bitterly and her husband uttered fierce
curses, but it was all in vain. She was put in a cart with her babe,
and as the arrangements went on, both submitted like all the rest--even
Phineas who crept into a pigeon-house with his wife and five children,
and crooked grave-haunting Kusaja. Do you remember her? Adonai! She had
seen father, mother, husband, and three noble sons, all that the Lord
had given her to love, borne to the tomb. They lay side by side in
our burying ground, and every morning and evening she went there and,
sitting on a log of wood which she had rolled close to the gravestones,
moved her lips constantly, not in prayer--no, I have listened often when
she did not know I was near--no; she talked to the dead, as though they
could hear her in the sepulchre, and understand her words like those who
walk alive beneath the sun. She is near seventy, and for thrice seven
years she has gone by the name of grave-haunting Kusaja. It was in sooth
a foolish thing to do; yet perhaps that was why she found it all the
harder to give it up, and go she would not, but hid herself among the
bushes. When Ahieser, the overseer, dragged her out, her wailing made
one's heart sore, yet when the time for departure came, the longing
to go seized upon her also, and she found it as hard to resist as the
others."

"What had happened to the poor creatures, what possessed them?" asked
Hosea, interrupting the old wife's speech; for in imagination he again
beheld the people he must lead, if he valued his father's blessing as
the most priceless boon the world could offer, and beheld them in all
their wretchedness.

The startled dame, fearing that she had offended her master's first-born
son, the great and powerful chieftain, stammered: