people throughout Palestine. Yet strangely no rain fell, though sixty
inches were the usual quantity in the course of the year. The streams
from the mountains were dried up; the land, long parched by the summer
sun, became like dust and ashes; the hills presented a blasted and
dreary desolation; the very trees were withered and discolored. At last
even the sheltered brook failed from which Elijah drank, and it became
necessary for the man of God to seek another retreat. The Lord therefore
sent him to the last place in which his enemies would naturally search
for him, even to a city of Phoenicia, where the worship of Baal was the
only religion of the land. As in his tattered and strange apparel he
approached Sarepta, or Zarephath, a town between Tyre and Sidon, worn
out with fatigue, parched with thirst, and overcome with
hunger,--everything around him being depressed and forlorn, the rivers
and brooks showing only beds of stone, the trees and grass withered, the
sky lurid, and of unnatural brightness like that of brass, and the sun
burning and scorching every remnant of vegetation,--he beheld a woman
issuing from the town to gather sticks, in order to cook what she
supposed would be her last meal. To this sad and discouraged woman,
doubtless a worshipper of Baal, the prophet thus spoke: "Fetch me, I
pray you, a little water in a vessel that I may drink;" and as she
turned sympathetically to look upon him, he added, "Bring me, I pray
thee, a morsel of bread in thine hand."

This was no small request to make of a woman who was herself on the
borders of starvation, and of a pagan woman too. But there was a
mysterious affinity between these two suffering souls. A common woman
would not have appreciated the greatness of the beggar and vagrant
before her. Only a discerning and sympathetic woman would have seen in
the tones of his voice, and in his lofty bearing, despite all his rags
and dirt, an unusual and marked character. She probably belonged to a