se
strong as granite and songful as a mountain brook. But I confess to
you, if I wanted to find a finer piece of literature than the book of
Ruth, I would be at a great loss to know where to search.

The author sets you down at once amidst strange scenery. And the
characters, while genuinely human, are also full of the witchery of
romance and poetry.

Here is the story. The rains have failed in the Bethlehem country and
the harvests have been exceedingly meager. A certain little family
composed of husband, wife and two children, is having a hard fight to
keep the wolf from the door. Elimelech, the husband, can find no work
and Naomi, the wife and mother, "kneads hunger in an empty bread tray,"
and goes through the daily torture of being asked for bread that she is
not able to supply.

Then one dark day the husband comes home utterly discouraged. He takes
up the discussion where it was left off the day before. "Yes," he
says, "there is nothing else to do. There is no bread in the land.
There has been rain in Moab. We can go there. I do not know how they
will receive us, but at any rate, they can only kill us and that is
better than starvation."

And Naomi's sad face becomes a shade sadder and she says, "The will of
the Lord be done. But I had so hoped that we might be able to remain
in the land of our fathers. You see, my dear, it is not of myself that
I am thinking. We have two boys. We do not want to rear them in Moab.
Moab, I know, is not far off physically, but it is a long way morally.
If we go there we may lose our children. The time may even come when
they will break the law of Moses and marry among the Moabites."

But, hard as it was for her to consent, at last she was driven into it
by sheer starvation. And we see the pathetic little family scourged by
hollow-eyed hunger from the land of their fathers into the land of the
heathen Moabites. Just what their reception was there we are not told.
However, I am quite sure that they were received more kindly than they
had expected. Their want and their own kindness seemed to have opened
the hearts of the strangers among whom they went to live. Certain it
is that the husband and father was able to find sufficient work to keep
from actual starvation. By and by times grew better. The pinch of
poverty let up, and they began to feel somewhat at home in the land of
their adoption.

But the boys were playing with the children of the Moabites. Of c