BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 215

How could they say that he would die! Oh God!
I could not lose him!”

By a strange instinct the sorrowing mother took her
dead boy into the prophet’s chamber, and laid him upon the
prophet’s bed. She called to the boy, but he did not answer;
she kissed his cold lips, but there was no response. The
balmy breeze from Mount Tabor blew in from the open window,
but. it brought no color back to the cold, dead face.

And as Martha and Mary in later years wished for the
coming of the Christ, when Lazarus was dead, so this sad-
hearted woman wished for the coming of the man of God.
And at last Elisha came. Entering his chamber on the wall
and closing the door, he gazed for a moment upon the dead
boy, who had always been the first to welcome him and the
last to bid him farewell. Then he prayed for power, and
stretching himself upon the child, hand to hand, heart to heart,
mouth to mouth, he breathed his very life into the child,
and he revived, and his heart began to beat, and his eyes
were filled with wondering glances, and he lived!

And what came of this boy of Shunam? Surely he was
not called back to life for nothing! Tradition says that
the boy of the sunstroke, after his mother’s death, became
the constant companion of the prophet Elisha, and that in
due time he himself became a prophet, none other than that
prophet Jonah, whom God sent to Nineveh to preach a
gospel of strange wonders.

There may be little to rely upon in this tradition, but
its very existence gives some sort of interest to the touching
story of the Shunammite’s son. It was worth being called
pack to life to do such a work as Jonah did. It is true
Jonah was reluctant to go where God told him to go, and
to say what God told him to say.