70 BOYS OF THE BIBLE.

puts him under a shrub and goes off a bow-shot, and begins
to weep until all the desert seems sobbing, AICO team Clay,
strikes clear through the heavens; and an angel of God comes
out of a cloud and looks down upon the appalling grief and
cries: ‘Hagar, what aileth thee?’ She looks up and she
sees the angel pointing to a well of water, where she fills
the bottle for the lad. Thank God! Thank God!”

So in the moment of their direst need God appears.
And, as we read, ‘God was with the lad; and he grew, and
dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.”

Ishmael became the founder of a great tribe, known as
the Bedouin Arabs, a tribe whose hands have been against
every man, and every man’s hand has been against them.
‘The desert wanderers, who for centuries overran the waste
places between the peninsular of Sinai and the Persian Gulf,
may be regarded as the direct descendants of Ishmael.

There are many things in this son of the Egyptian bond-
woman worthy of admiration; there was a bold, free, inde-
pendent spirit about him that, rightly guided and wisely con-
trolled, might have made of Ishmael one of the grandest men
of the early age. He became embittered and hard, and
there was some excuse for this; but whatever wrongs he
had been called upon to endure formed no justification for
that resentful spirit that became the master spirit of his after
years.

An outcast from the tents of Abraham, he became a
willing voluntary outcast from the homes and haunts of the
whole human family. He dwelt apart from his fellow men,
with the exception of his own tribe, and he was able to so
imbue followers with his own dark, brooding spirit, that to
be an “Ishmaelite ” meant not so much to be a descendant
of Ishmael, as to be a representative of his unhappy dispo-