10 STATESMEN AND SAGES to rest with his fathers, he yet conquered the last natural yearning and withdrew from the sight and sympathy of men to die alone and unattended, lest the idola- trous feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord him the super- stitious reverence he had refused in life. " No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." But while the despoiled tombs of the Pharaohs mock the vanity that reared them, the name of the He brew who, revolting from their tyranny, strove for the elevation of his fellow- men, is yet a beacon light to the world. DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL* BY MARGARET E. SANGSTER (1074-1001 B.C.) M' ORE than a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era, in a little farmstead in Palestine, there was re- joicing at the birth of a son. Not the first- born, whose coming was a fit occasion for gifts and feasting, not the second, the third, nor even the seventh. David was the eighth son of Jesse the Bethlehemite. Jesse would seem to have been a landholder, as his fa- thers had been before him, a man of sub- stance, with fields and flocks and herds. We first meet David, a ruddy, fair-haired lad, tough of sinew and keen of eye and aim, keeping the sheep among the mountains. Two hundred years before David's day, a fair woman of Moab had brought a new infusion of strength, a new type, into the princely line of Judah. The blood of the daring children of the wilderness flowed in the veins of those who descended from Boaz. Just as in modern times and in royal houses a single feature, as a set of the jaw, a curve of the lips, a fulness of the brow or the eye, is stamped upon a race by some marriage of its heir with a strong woman of another race, so, it has always seemed to me, that the poetry, the romance, the fire and the passion, came with Ruth of Moab into the household of Boaz. For they were strong and beautiful, these sons of Jesse, who had Ruth as their not remote an- cestress, and the mother-qualities live long and tell through many generations. Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess
