She broke off, rose, and flung another stone at the birds.

“My daughter, think not slightly of God’s wisdom.”

“Nay, man of God, I am thinking that God was wiser than thou or I.”

The old prophet rose from his stone.  His dull eyes tried to read her face.  She touched his hand.

“Come, and see.”

The figure of the man still stood, three paces behind them, upright against the hillside, as when Elisha had first turned the corner and come upon him.  But now, led by Miriam, the prophet drew quite close and peered.  Dimly, and then less dimly, he discerned first that the head had fallen forward on the breast, and that the hair upon the scalp was caked in dry blood; next, that the figure did not stand of its own will at all, but was held upright to a stout post by an iron ring about the neck and a rope about the waist.  He put out a finger and touched the face.  It was cold.

“Thy son?”

“They stoned him with these stones.  His wife stood by.”

“The Syrians?”

“The Syrians.  They went northward before noon, taking her.  The plain is otherwise burnt than on the day when I sought across it for his sake to Carmel.”

“Well did King David entreat the hand of the Lord rather than the hand of man.  I had not heard of thy son’s marrying.”

“Five years ago he went down with a gift to Philistia, to them that sheltered us in the famine.  He brought back this woman.”

“She betrayed him?”

“He heard her speak with a Syrian, and fled up the hill.  From the little window in the wall—­see, it smokes yet—­she called and pointed after him.  And they ran and overtook him.  With this iron they fastened him, and with these stones they stoned him.  Man of God, I am thinking that God was wiser than thou or I.”

The old man stood musing, and touched the heap of stones gently, stone after stone, with the end of his staff.

“He was wiser.”

Cling—­cling—­clink!

Miriam had taken up a stone, and with it was hammering feebly, impotently, upon the rivets in the iron band.

As the sun dropped below Carmel the prophet cast down his staff and stretched out two groping hands to help her.

“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER”

Early last Fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife.  The woman went first, and the husband took a chill at her grave’s edge, when he stood bareheaded in a lashing shower.  The loose earth crumbled under his feet, trickled over, and dropped on her coffin-lid.  Through two long nights he lay on his bed without sleeping and listened to this sound.  At first it ran in his ears perpetually, but afterwards he heard it at intervals only, in the pauses of acute suffering.  On the seventh day he died, of pleuro-pneumonia; and on the tenth (a Sunday) they buried him.  For just fifty years the dead man had been minister of the Independent chapel on