gion where Abraham was born, a
region now occupied by the people called Curds, who are perhaps
descendants of the old Chaldees, the inhabitants of Ur. The Curds are
Mohammedans and robbers, and quite independent, never paying taxes to the
Porte. The Chaldees are frequently mentioned in Scripture and in ancient
writers. Xenophon speaks of the Carduchi as inhabitants of the mountains
of Armenia, and as making incursions thence to plunder the country, just
as the Curds do now. He says they were found there by the younger Cyrus,
and by the ten thousand Greeks. The Greeks, in their retreat, were obliged
to fight their way through them, and found them very skilful archers. So
did the Romans under Crassus and Mark Antony. And so are they described by
the Prophet Habakkuk (chap, i. 6-9):--

"For lo, I raise up the Chaldeans,
A bitter and hasty nation,
Which marches far and wide in the earth,
To possess the dwellings that are not theirs.
They are terrible and dreadful,
Their decrees and their judgments proceed only from themselves.
Swifter than leopards are their horses,
And fiercer than the evening wolves.
Their horsemen prance proudly around;
And their horsemen shall come from afar and fly,
Like the eagle when he pounces on his prey.
They all shall come for violence,
In troops,--their glance is ever forward!
They gather captives like the sand!"

As they were in the time of Habakkuk, so are they to-day. Shut up on every
side in the Persian Empire, their ancestors, the Carduchi, refused
obedience to the great king and his satraps, just as the Curds refuse to
obey the grand seignior and his pashas. They can raise a hundred and forty
thousand armed men. They are capable of any undertaking. Mohammed himself
said, "They would yet revolutionize the world."

The ancient Chaldees seem to have been fire-worshippers, like the
Persians. They were renowned for the study of the heavens and the worship
of the stars, and some remains of Persian dualism still linger among their
descendants, who are accused of Devil-worship by their neighbors.

That Abraham was a real person, and that his story is historically
reliable, can hardly be doubted by those who have the historic sense. Such
pictures, painted in detail with a Pre-Raphaelite minuteness, are not of
the nature of legends. Stories which are discreditable to his character,
and which place him in a humiliating position towards Ph