is people, and send them back again to Palestine.

The scene displayed in this picture you will recognize at a glance.
Moses, the Hebrew babe, afloat on the Nile, in a small boat made of
bulrushes by his mother, because Pharaoh was slaying the children of her
nation, to get rid of them.

Neither the haughty and cruel monarch, nor the mother, nor the little
voyager, thought of Moses as the future deliverer of his countrymen from
bondage--the great leader and lawgiver of Israel.

We have already had glimpses of the Hebrews in the wilderness, their
progress and rulers in Palestine, after the moving multitude reached the
"promised land."

The ages of changing sovereigns, and fortunes of crimes and discipline
brought them at last to another mournful captivity.

About six hundred years before Christ, while that wicked Manassah was
king in Palestine, the monarch of Assyria--a grand and powerful
empire--invaded it, and took Jerusalem. Manassah was carried in chains
to Babylon, the splendid Assyrian capital. His son, Amon, became the
sovereign under the Assyrian conqueror, but was soon assassinated, and
Josiah took the throne.

During his reign, the King of Egypt marched into Palestine and conquered
it, killing Josiah, the king.

A few years later, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian monarch, besieged and
took Jerusalem, the "City of David."

The massive walls of the cities of old was their chief protection. Those
of Babylon, according to the old Roman historians, were marvelously
great. Think of them rising three hundred and fifty feet, eighty-seven
feet in thickness, and extending sixty miles around the city! One writer
says, that two four-horse chariots could pass each other on the top.
They were built of brick, cemented together with bitumen.

They had twenty gates made of solid brass, and were surmounted with two
hundred and fifty towers.

The city had six hundred and seventy-six squares, each over two miles in
circumference. The river Euphrates flowed through the entire extent,
from north to south.

The hanging gardens, suspended from the walls, were gorgeous, and the
public buildings rich and elegant.

Such was the home of the Hebrew exiles for seventy years or more.

Quintus Curtius, a Roman, has described the entrance of the great and
victorious Alexander into Babylon, at a later period, who soon after
died there of dissipation, while yet a young man. The pleasant sketch
gives a vivid impression of the glory