Of all old stories, I hardly know a better one than this of Naaman and the little maid from Samaria.  It is full of human nature; that is, it shows that people acted and felt three thousand years ago just as they do now:  they were kind and sympathetic, and proud and grateful and covetous and deceitful, just as people are nowadays.  And the story has a fine romantic setting; that is, its incidents take hold of our fancy and charm us;—­a little girl stolen in war and carried to a foreign country and put into the house of a great general, who falls very ill and is cured in a wonderful way, and so on.  I think it will please us all to hear it over again.

Syria and Israel stood to each other very much like Germany and Switzerland.  One was a great, rich country, with fine rivers like the Rhine and Danube, and a capital city so beautiful that it was called “the eye of the East”; while Israel was a small country, full of mountains, and with only one small river that ran nearly dry in summer.  To tell the truth, Syria looked down on Israel, and—­what is worse—­often made war on it.  In those days war was even more cruel and senseless than it is now; for it was not confined to the armies that fought and captured one another, but extended to women and children, who were often seized, carried away from their homes into the country of the enemy, and made slaves.  It is bad and senseless enough for men to stand up and stab one another as they used to in old times, or shoot one another as they do now; but to carry a mother away from her children, or take a little girl away from her home and playmates and make a slave of her, is something worse.  But it was often done in those ancient days, as you will learn when you read history, and the story of the siege of Troy, which sprang out of stealing a beautiful woman.

There were frequent wars between Syria and Israel.  Israel had once conquered Syria, and Syria had broken away, and so it went on back and forth, year after year.  When our story begins, Naaman, a great general, had delivered his country from Israel, and brought home with him a little Hebrew girl, who was so beautiful and sweet in her ways that he gave her to his wife on his return from the war.  A strange present, you say, but it proved a very valuable one.  It seems to us very cruel.  One would think that if Naaman and his wife loved this little girl—­and I am sure they did—­they would have sent her back to her home, for she must have had a heartbreaking time of it at first; but people were not kind in that way in those days.  Yes, I am sure they loved her and were kind to her, for the simple reason that she evidently loved them; and I am also sure that the reason they loved her was that they could not help it, as we shall see further on.