Note 2 — ISAIAH. (continued 12)

I was reading, a day or two ago, one of our last books of travels in the wilderness of the Exodus, in which the writer told how, after toiling for hours under a scorching sun, over the hot white marly flat, seeing nothing but a beetle or two on the way, and finding no shelter anywhere from the pitiless beating of the sunshine, the three travellers came at last to a little Retem bush only a few feet high, and flung themselves down and tried to hide at least their heads from those ‘sunbeams like swords,’ even beneath its ragged shade. And my text tells of a great rock, with blue dimness in its shadow, with haply a fern or two in the moist places of its crevices, where there is rest and a man can lie down and be cool, while all outside is burning sun, and burning sand, and dancing mirage.—A. Maclaren.