Another, who rejoiced greatly in the beginning of my book, is gone 'beyond the weeping,' having hasted her escape from the windy storm and tempest.' With affection and reverence which words cannot tell, I inscribe these pages to the well-beloved name and fragrant memory of Henrietta B. Haines. There will never be a dark day in all our lives when we shall not miss her longingly; nor a day of any sort when we will not give thanks, that at last she is where they shall not sorrow any more at all.'

December 1880.

WHAT AILETH THEE?

IF

I.

The Wilderness of Beersheba.

What aileth thee, Hagar?-GEN. xxi. 17.

you want to be sure that the world is much alike in all ages, go back and study the experience of the people who once were here. Their joys perplex us a little sometimes ; we puzzle over David's dance before the ark; and the shout of triumph over Jericho before it fell, has but a faint echo in these later times. Only the sorrow-and the sighingare just what they have always been, and what they always will be, until sorrow and sighing shall flee away. And so, from end to end, this pitiful story (in all its essentials) is a story of to-day.

For the same heart-experience comes to different people in different ways; and to get to ourselves the good of some particular story, it is not always possible-nor best—that we should know just how it came about. The circumstances (in effect) are like our own; the sorrow has the same leaden

A

hue; and if you could hear the dropping of Hagar's tears that long-ago morning in far-off Beersheba, I think you could not tell them from your own.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lifted up her voice, and wept.-GEN. xxi. 14-16.

-We often dull our sympathy with thoughts of the sin which lies back of so much of human sorrow,-while really that should quicken it. And besides, it has little to do with the story for us. Whether the subject of it deserved the suffering, whether he came into it by his own fault, are often quite secondary questions. As here with Hagar. Very likely she had not been faultless. Very likely she had met Sarah's unwise show of headship with equally unwise resistance. But leave all that on one side, and grant that as usual they were both to blame-the present facts themselves were hard enough. She who had been only second in place in Abraham's tent, for years the mother of his only son and his supposed heir, now suddenly found herself homeless, helpless, hopeless. Alone in the wilderness of this world; whether by her own fault or that of others, did not perhaps much change the first taste of the grief. The fault that came with it had far more to do.

Hagar was an Egyptian. Just now the tents of her master Abraham were probably pitched at Beersheba, no unmanageable distance from her native land. And doubt