dark eyes, with red cheeks glowing through an olive-colored skin, lips like a pomegranate, a sweet, patient, loving expression, and a voice “gentle and low” and full of sympathy and readiness.  I am very sure about her voice and expression, because I know her character.  I never have seen any one with a loving and helpful spirit who had not a gentle voice and a sweet expression.  I think she must have been about twelve years old; for if she had been younger she would not have known all about Elisha, and if older she would not have been called “a little maid.”

When the trouble came upon Naaman’s family, she felt it grievously, and was more attentive and gentle in her services than ever.  Just here she showed the beauty of her character.  She had been cruelly wronged—­stolen away from her country and home, and made a slave without hope of ever seeing them again—­and so might naturally feel revengeful, and say that Naaman’s leprosy was a punishment for the wrong he had done her.  But instead she pitied him, and in her sympathy with his sufferings forgot her own.  So, as she brooded on the trouble, she happened to remember one day that Elisha had cured people who were very ill, and done many wonderful things, and she said to her mistress, “Would God my lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria! for he would recover him of his leprosy.”  Probably Naaman’s wife questioned her closely about Elisha, and got at all she knew about him, and so heard about the child that fell sick among the reapers, and the poor widow whose two sons were to be sold as slaves, and the mantle of Elijah, that Elisha had caught upon the banks of the Jordan, with which he smote the waters.  At any rate, she heard enough to awaken some hope, and so told her husband what our little maid had said.  When people are hopelessly ill, they are willing to try anything; a drowning man will catch at a straw, and Naaman caught at this little straw of hope that the wind of war had blown across his path.  He thought it over and said to himself, “It is my only chance; no one here can do anything for me.  I will go down to Samaria and find Elisha.  I have often heard that the prophets there did wonderful things; if what the little maid says of the boy among the reapers is true, perhaps Elisha can cure me.”  And so he went; but it was very humiliating.  He thought of Israel and the little city of Samaria and the Jordan in a scornful way, comparing them with his splendid Damascus, and its green, beautiful plain, thirty miles wide, and the great river Abana, that gushed from the side of the mountain, and flowed through and all about the city, making the whole country one vast garden.  He despised, too, the people of Israel.  They were rude and poor and ignorant, while his own people were rich and cultivated.  Perhaps he had borne himself proudly when he was at war there; and now to go back and ask favors—­to ask for himself what he could not get at home—­was humiliating indeed.  But he made the best of it; and to cover his pride and make it seem as though he were not asking favors, he took with him an immense amount of silver and gold, and ten suits of raiment—­perhaps of linen damask, that was first made in Damascus.