184 BOYS OF THE BIBLE.

fires burning that scared the jackals from the scene. Think of
this, boys! Think of this grand mother of the ancient time,
who kept watch not for a day, or for a week, but for
months! Here was as glorious an example of motherly
devotion as the old world ever saw. Months of watching!
months of loneliness! months of heartache!—all for love
of the dead. What memories would come back to her of
the early, happy days, when Armoni and Mephibosheth were
boys, as she sat watching the huge cross all through those
long, hot summer days! She lived over again the days of their
childhood; heard again their young voices making the hills and
valleys echo with merriment and song; saw them once again at
their gambols and play; watched them growing up through
youth to early manhood—her brave, fair, noble sons! And
now she lifted her eyes and saw their bodies hanging from
the cross of shame; or perchance at night, after having
stolen from the dark hours a brief, fitful sleep, she would
start as from some horrid dream, and looking up would see in
the baleful glare of the watchfires a reality sadder than her
saddest dreams. ‘The suffering Saviour had His brow girt
with a crown of thorns, Rizpah’s brow was girt with a
crown of sorrows. One of our great modern poets says:

“A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.”

If this be so, Rizpah, the widowed, childless mother,
who kept her sad vigil on the heights of Gibeah, must have
been a very queen of sorrows. No wonder that the early
writers on the Old Testament Scriptures should apply to
Rizpah the title of the ancient “mother of sorrows”; a title
applied almost exclusively, in later days, to the Mother of
our Lord.

When the rains of October began to fall and the harvest