When to the great comfort of his father Saul had been restored to him safe and well, and he had refreshed himself after his journey, his uncle drew him aside and questioned him. Strange rumours had reached his ears.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘which way did you go, and what kept you so long?’

Saul told him that after he and his servant had spent two whole days among the mountains in search of the strayed asses, they had turned south, but had still been unable to find them.

‘I myself,’ he said, ‘had given up hope of ever seeing them again, and had decided to turn back. But the lad with me said that in a city near at hand, whose walls indeed we could actually see from where we sat, we should find a man of God, a seer, who might consent to help us, and would of his wisdom reveal whither they had strayed. We had little enough with us for an offering; but so we did.’

He turned his strange clear eyes away, his face haunted by some inward light or influence his uncle had never seen there before and could not divine.

‘And what was the name of this seer?’ he said.

Saul sighed. ‘It was the prophet, Samuel,’ he answered.

‘Prophet indeed!’ said his uncle, and watched him closely as he enquired: ‘Tell me, what did the prophet say to thee?’

‘He received me graciously,’ said Saul, ‘telling me to have no further care for the asses since they had been found. He knew all.’

And though his uncle still continued to question him, Saul told him nothing more, and not one word of the secret and marvellous thing that had been between himself and Samuel but one day gone, when in the first beams of sunrise the great prophet had anointed his head with oil and hailed him prince of Israel.

Soon after this—and it was drawing near the season of the first harvest, when almost continual fair weather brings to ripeness the barley-fields of Canaan—Samuel summoned the men of Israel to an assembly at Mizpeh in Benjamin. Day by day, hour by hour, they came flocking in from near and far—the chief men of every clan and family, with their servants—long slow caravans and throngs of those who had joined together in company, having met at the by-ways and continuing on together, with their beasts of burden and their baggage.

On the wide slopes of Mizpeh the camp was pitched. There they hobbled their beasts; and their baggage was heaped together in a mound upon its outskirts.

At the hour appointed by Samuel they assembled in their host, sitting cross-legged upon the ground in the wide open space before the doors of the temple, within which, in the Holy of Holies, lay the Ark of the Covenant. They had set themselves in order according to their tribes and clans, a great multitude, men old and young, rich and poor, and all of the lineage of the sons of Jacob and Joseph.

Samuel himself sat in his high seat at the entering-in of the temple; and round about him stood the priests of the Lord. He had summoned the tribesmen of Israel to come together that all might bear witness to the election of the Lord’s anointed, the king who should henceforth reign over them.

As was the custom in Israel in affairs of great moment, the divine will was to be openly revealed by the casting of lots.

Among the priests stood the High Priest. He wore a robe of fine linen, embroidered about its hem with pomegranates in needlework—blue and purple and scarlet. Bells of pure gold were sewn between the