rd of her goodness to Naomi, her mother, and
praised her.

[Illustration: Ruth and Naomi.]

When the midday heat was great the reapers gathered in a shady place,
and Boaz bade Ruth come and share their bread and light wine, and he
gave her parched corn, as much as she could eat. In the afternoon they
rose to work again, and Boaz told the reapers to let the girl glean
among the sheaves, and pull out a handful here and there; and she
gleaned there till the sun went down over the hills.

Now the corn that she gathered was too heavy for her to carry away as
it was, so she sat down and beat the barley out between two stones, and
tying it up in her veil, put it on her head, and went home with a light
step. Naomi was astonished when she opened out her store in the little
house; for she had gleaned more than a bushel of barley.

When she told Naomi where she had been, her mother said that Boaz was a
relative of her own; and the elder woman was glad indeed to hear that
he had given Ruth leave to glean in his fields during the whole of the
harvest time.

And so it came about that every day at the red dawn Ruth went singing
down the rocky pathway to work with the reapers in the warm Eastern
valley; and as the wheat harvest followed close upon the barley
harvest, she worked for many days, returning home at night with her
ruddy cheeks burnt brown with the sun, to lay her heap on the floor of
her mother's house; for they were laying up a little store with which
to bake bread in the months of wind and rain that were before them in
the coming winter.

But as time went on they did not need to live in poverty, for Boaz
married Ruth at the end of the wheat harvest; and this Moabite girl
became the great-grandmother of King David, the most famous king of
Israel, and one of the ancestors of Jesus Christ our Lord Himself.

THE CHILD SAMUEL.

I.

When the Israelites had made their home in the promised land of Canaan,
they did not forget the God of their great ancestor Jacob; but they set
up on a hill called Shiloh a tabernacle, or place of worship, where
they came to offer sacrifice to the God of their fathers.

Here the priests of the tabernacle killed bullocks and rams and goats,
and burnt their flesh on the great altars, believing that these
offerings were pleasing to God; and here the people came also to the
chief of the priests whenever they had disputes with their neighbours,
for the "high priest" was a judge in Isr