rvation of the
body after death was the passion of life; among a people who were even
then carrying the remains of their great ancestor, Joseph, 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
idolatrous feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord
him the superstitious 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
Hebrew who, revolting from their tyranny, strove for the elevation of
his fellow-men, is yet a beacon light to the world.

[Signature of the author.]

DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL[3]

By MARGARET E. SANGSTER

(1074-1001 B.C.)

[Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

[Illustration: David Rex. [TN]]

More than a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era, in
a little farmstead in Palestine, there was rejoicing 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 fathers had been before him, a man of substance, 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
ancestress, and the mother-qualities live long and tell through many
generations.

Of Jesse's many sons, David was the youngest. His early life was spent
as was that of other boys belonging to his class and period. He must
have added to his natural abilities and qui