Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: trader in any land. The scattered people are known everywhere—you cannot mistake them. They are rich, prosperous, and waiting still. The vision is for an appointd time,— though it tarry, it will come. In the meantime Babylon is a heap,—and oppressed and denationalized fellaheen are all that remain of the once proud Egyptian race. After the solemn day of the circumcision, Sodom was destroyed, and fifteen years later Isaac is born. For thirteen years has Sarah had to watch the growth of Ishmael, ere her arms are clasped around Isaac, and she nurses him at her bosom; but, oh, the long weary waiting time! I seem to see her with sad brows and half-veiled lids, watching the beauty and strength of Ishmael, and the stately step of Hagar, in whom slavery cannot veil the pride of maternity. She sees her slave's eyes seeking the lithe form of Ishmael in his games of mimic war—Abraham's child, born at her own request. Perhaps she regrets the doubting heart that prompted a wish for the child. I wonder if the deep longing for children on the part of Jewish womanhood is not an inheritance from their beautiful ancestress. But she holds him at last, the promised child, and in her exultation she says: who would have said to Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck. Did she not remember the promise in the tent at Mamre, and her laughing response? Years pass and now she hears " the flow of the wondrous stream that rolls by the border land of souls." Dear eyes watch her as she recedes in space. I have often wondered at the great space Sarah occupies in Bible History. A whole chapter, the twenty-eighth Genesis, is devoted to the account of her death and burial. She was royally entombed. The veiy choice of the sepulchres -of the people of the land where she sojourned were offered to Abra... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.