and vanity, yet his wrath burnt as if mortal blood had been in him.  Saul bowed unto him and told him his trouble, how he was sore distressed, for the Philistines made war upon him, and God had departed from him, and answered him not.  It was a dreadful sight, so the woman herself told me afterwards, a king abasing himself before a spectre of a priest and craving mercy.  The worst foe whom Saul had in the land would have felt his heart touched, and the wicked woman herself was moved with great compassion.  If success could not be promised, at least some comfort might have been given, but Samuel was bitterness itself; terrible he always was to me, so bitter and so hard that I shuddered at him.  He turned upon Saul and denounced him, he, the dead, denounced him who was about to die, and declared that the Lord was his enemy.  Enemy! for what, because he had spared Agag?  And yet that was, in a measure, the reason; for Saul was too much of a man for the priest, and therefore the priest set up David against him.  The ghost stood there, and doomed the king.  “The Lord,” he cried, “hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbour, even to David, because thou obeyedst not the voice of the Lord, nor executedst His fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord done this thing unto thee this day.  Moreover, the Lord will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines; and to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me:  the Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines.”  For this cause Saul was to fall, and his three sons, and there was to be a great slaughter of Israel.  When David the adulterer murdered Uriah, was that not a worse crime, yet was his punishment as Saul’s?  And what punishment there was fell not on David as it would have fallen upon my lord and upon me.  After David’s son died, he straightway rose up, eat and drank, and went in unto Bathsheba the whore; and she, the wife of Uriah, whom he had murdered, submitted to be comforted by him.

When Saul heard the words of Samuel, he fell straightway in the darkness all along on the earth, and there was no strength in him, for he had eaten no bread all the day nor all the night.  The woman offered him bread, but he sat on the bed and would not eat.  At last, as the morning was breaking, he consented to eat, and he went away to make ready for the fight.  He was assured he would perish that day, and that before the sun set he would be in Sheol with Samuel, bat he did not play the coward and nee.  He fought as the king he was, but the Philistines were too many for him; the curse from the Lord was upon the Israelites, so that they feared and fled.  Jonathan, with Abinadab and Melchishua, his brothers, were around Saul to the last, but they were slain.  The men-at-arms dared not come near Saul, but the archers pressed him sorely from afar, and he could not close with them, and he saw his end was at hand.  He would not