something, no matter how crude. A bright thing, as the sun, an inanimate thing cut from wood or stone, a living thing, as a tree or an animal, or an element, as the wind, will serve; but worship all men do. No nation ever has been able to face calmly the thought of annihilation. The protest against being wiped out utterly is inborn and universal. That grand old pessimist, Omar Khayyam, expressed himself thus:

Said one among them, surely not in vain,

My substance from the common earth was ta'en,
And to this Figure moulded to be broke,

Or trampled into shapeless earth again."

The man who above all others busied himself with the mistakes of Moses made this point still clearer. Standing beside the grave of a loved brother, in an hour of heartrending grief, he said, “In the night-time of despair Hope sees a star, and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing." The star that he saw in his hope was the same that led the children of Israel, and the wing he heard was the shelter under which they took refuge.

CHAPTER II

THE PLACE

"Ah, the land of the rustling of wings;

Which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia."

-ISAIAH.

WHEN SO sane a historian as Isaiah designated a nation as "The land of the rustling of wings," we feel that the birds must have been as numerous as any one other form of creation worth considering. This statement is confirmed by Pliny, who several centuries later wrote that birds flew into Italy in clouds from across the sea; and that at times, weary with winging their long course, they settled in such numbers upon sailing vessels as to sink them.

The lands of the Bible are Canaan, lying along the east end of the Mediterranean Sea, in a narrow hilly and mountainous strip; then the valley of the Jordan, through which flowed the sacred river in which Jesus was baptized; another strip of hills and mountains; and Syria adjoining, which shortly stretched away into desert.

At the south-east of the sea lay Arabia, the Sinai Peninsula, across which Moses led the Hebrews in a great circular journey of three times the length necessary to have reached their destination in a straight line. The southern part of this country is hilly and mountainous, and the northern a wide desert that runs almost to the sea, where Canaan and Egypt touch in a narrow strip along the coast. The Gulf of Akaba lies on the east, stretching half the length of the country; the Red Sea on the south, and the Gulf of Suez forms over half of the western boundary, Egypt the remainder.

Egypt adjoins these countries south of the sea. There is hilly land along the Nile, fertile plains, and then the desert. That desert which the Egyptians tell you stretches away "a march of a thousand days." And, as if evolved

with the earth from the beginning, the pyramids stand and challenge us to tell of the time when they were not; and through the ages the Sphynx maintains unbroken silence.

While we marvel at these piles of stone, antiquities of a thousand years at the time of Moses, as if to jest with us from some innermost recess, time heaves out to us a vessel of porcelain, and from the brush-strokes on its bottom a Chinese savant glibly reads, "For lo, the spring is here!" Eternity seems to be not a place toward which we are travelling, but a time from which we came, when we face this evidence, that however old Egypt may be, even in the time of Moses she was young compared with China and India, who previous to those days were possessed of the secret of manufacturing vessels of porcelain and decorating them with the essence of poesy.

Egypt, Arabia, and Canaan are the locations in which the scenes of Bible history were enacted. Here is the very earth trodden by Moses, Solomon, David, Isaiah, Jesus, and John. These are the mountains they climbed, the lakes where they fished, the rivers in which they bathed.

Most of the action of the Bible takes place in Canaan. This little strip of country, one hundred and forty miles in length, and averaging from sixty to one hundred miles in width, lying along the east end of the Mediterranean, had greater variation in climate, soil, vegetation, plant and animal life than any other of the same size in the whole world. Any swift bird could fly the length or breadth of the country in a few hours, yet here lay the fertile Jordan Valley, one thousand three hundred feet below sea level; here rose the snow-capped ranges of Hermon and Lebanon from two to three thousand feet above. Between these extremes could be found rich valleys, broad, fertile plains, highlands, foothills, and low mountains. David described the natural springs of that land: 'He sendeth forth springs into the valleys;

They run among the mountains ;

They give drink to every beast of the field;
The wild asses quench their thirst.

By them the fowls of the heaven have their habitation,

They sing among the branches."

B

There were cold mountain rivulets, dashing through rocky gorges; peaceful rivers crossing the plains and valleys; the great salt sea lying in the interior, the Mediterranean on the west, and the desert stretching away on the east.

Over all a tropical sun streamed, its rays broken by mountains and rank forests; while cool wind from the sea alternated with scorching sirocco from the desert. The whole country was covered with such trees and vegetation as these conditions would induce. In this amazing variety of soil and climate many plants elsewhere unknown developed, and birds native to this country alone.

A collared turtle-dove originated around the Dead Sea; a new species of grackle rocked on the rushes of Merom; a night-hawk unlike any other sailed over valley and plain, and in great numbers the exquisite little sun-bird darted among sweet flowering spice-bushes.

One readily can see how the writers of the Bible in recording life as they lived it under those geographical conditions, would give to the actors of the book a setting which would seem familiar to readers of all time anywhere on the face of the globe. So true to all lands everywhere are those pictures of life where one day's journey led from snow-capped mountain to fertile valley; from farming, fishing, and carpentering to the wandering life of the tent tribes; and from the grandest court of an earthly king to the wilderness.

Rank vegetation crept everywhere after moisture. There were rushes, water-grasses, and flags growing all along the rivers and around the lakes. The glittering black birds rocked on the sunlit rushes; among them the herons searched for frogs; the brooding rails nested in silence, and the bitterns boomed in the night watches. Frogs croaked along the shores, the crocodile and alligator splashed in the water, and the rhinoceros raised from its wallow and waddled off across country in search of foliage for food.

Along the Nile and up and down the Jordan the laughing kingfisher chuckled in its noisy flight, one of the veriest birds of history, amused, no doubt, at how it had fooled countries older than these. For of all the birds known

to the most ancient world, none had so bewildered students and thinkers as the kingfisher. They knew the old, they knew the young, but never a nest or brooding mother could they find, search as they might. For these birds had followed the seacoast and had come down from Greece to perplex these people also. Their Grecian name, alceon, as we translate halcyon, was brought with them.

The Greeks disliked defeat, and so when they were compelled to give up anything they went romancing and manufactured something to fit the case. They called this cheerful habit mythology, and as it was so much easier to imagine things than to dig to the root of matters, their mythology was almost as copious as their history. When they failed to find the nests of these birds in the trees or on the land, it became evident to them that brooding must take place upon the water. As this seemed rather risky business, even to the Greeks, they decided that the birds nested at the time of the summer solstice, when the waves were calmest, so that there would be some small chance of bringing off the young unharmed.

As the nestlings appeared regularly every season it seemed probable that these birds were favoured of the gods, and the Greeks evolved the fiction that halcyons had power to still the waves, so they were venerated by sailors. At Moses' time in their history no one knew where they nested, but their traditions clung to them and followed them across the sea ages later, where their dried bodies were hung in houses to bring good luck, and in belief of their power to prevent harm there was a custom in Germany of packing them among flannels to drive away moths.

Pliny wrote: "The Halcyons are of great name and much marked. The very seas and they that sail thereon know well when they sit and breed." Since he quoted Aristotle so frequently, it seems peculiar that Pliny did not avail himself of the fact that his predecessor had seen a nest, for Aristotle recorded that they were "shaped like a cucumber, the size of a large sponge, and covered." "The material of the nest is disputed, but it appears to be composed of the spines of the belon, for the bird itself