“Miss Harson,” asked Edith, very earnestly, “isn’t the palm tree in the Bible?”

[Illustration:  DATE-PALM AT JERICHO.]

“It certainly is, dear,” replied her governess, “and it is one of the trees most frequently mentioned.  In Deuteronomy, thirty-fourth chapter, third verse, Jericho is called the ‘city of palm trees.’  Travelers still speak of these trees as yet growing in Palestine, but they are not nearly so abundant as they once were; near Jericho only one or two can be found.  There are many allusions to the palm in the Scriptures.  King David, in the ninety-second psalm, says that the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree:  ’Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.  They shall bring forth fruit in old age.’  The palm is always upright, in spite of rain or wind.  ’There it stands, looking calmly down upon the world below, and patiently yielding its large clusters of golden fruit from generation to generation.  It brings forth fruit in old age.’  The allusion to being planted in the house of the Lord is probably drawn from the custom of planting beautiful and long-lived trees in the courts of temples and palaces.  Solomon covered all the walls of the holy of holies round about with golden palm trees.—­You will find this, Clara, in First Kings.”

Clara read: 

“’And he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved figures of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers, within and without[26].’”

[26] I Kings vi. 29.

“In the thirty-second verse,” continued Miss Harson, “it is written that he overlaid them with gold, ’and spread gold upon the cherubim, and upon the palm trees.’  ’They were thus planted, as it were, within the very house of the Lord; and their presence there was not only ornamental, but appropriate and highly suggestive—­the very best emblem not only of patience in well-doing, but of the rewards of the righteous, a fat and flourishing old age, a peaceful end, a glorious immortality.’”

“What does a ‘palmer’ mean, Miss Harson?” asked Malcolm.  “Is it a man who has palm trees or who sells dates?  I saw the word in a book I was reading, but I couldn’t understand what it meant.”

“In olden times,” replied his governess, “when people made so many pilgrimages, some of the pilgrims went to the Holy Land and some to Rome and other places; but those who went to Palestine were thought to be the most devout, both because it was so much farther off and because there were so many sacred spots to visit there.  These pilgrims always brought home with them branches of palm, to show that they had really been to the land where the tree grew; and so they were called palmers.  To say that such-a-one was a palmer was far more than to say that he was a pilgrim.”

“Miss Harson,” said Clara, holding up one of the books, “here is a picture called ‘the cocoanut-palm,’ but I didn’t know that cocoanuts grew on palm trees.  Will you tell us something about it?”