the end of all things, and making the glorious tints of the rainbow,
which are produced by sunlight upon water, stand as the pledge of this
assurance. Of man He required abstinence from eating the blood of
animals, and from shedding the blood of man, putting, as it were, a mark
of sacredness upon life-blood, so as to lead the mind on to the Blood
hereafter to be shed.

Soon a choice was made among the sons of Noah. Ham mocked at his
father's infirmity, while his two brothers veiled it; and Noah was
therefore inspired to prophesy that Canaan, the son of the undutiful
Ham, should be accursed, and a servant of servants; that Shem should
especially belong to the Lord God, and that Japhet's posterity should be
enlarged, and should dwell in the tents of Shem. Thus Shem was marked as
the chosen, yet with hope that Japhet should share in his blessings.

It seems as if Ham had brought away some of the arts and habits of the
giant sons of Cain, for in all worldly prosperity his sons had the
advantage. In 2247 B. C. the sons of men banded themselves together to
build the Tower of Babel on the plain of Shinar, just below the hills of
Armenia, where the two great rivers Euphrates and Tigris make the flats
rich and fertile. For their presumption, God confounded their speech,
and the nations first were divided. Ham's children got all the best
regions; Nimrod, the child of his son Cush, kept Babel, built the first
city, and became the first king. Canaan's sons settled themselves in
that goodliest of all lands which bore his name; and Mizraim's children
obtained the rich and beautiful valley of the Nile, called Egypt. All
these were keen clever people, builders of cities, cultivators of the
land, weavers and embroiderers, earnest after comfort and riches, and
utterly forgetting, or grievously corrupting, the worship of God. Others
of the race seem to have wandered further south, where the heat of the