The Seeker

by Harry Leon Wilson

On they read to the Deluge, when man became so very bad indeed that God was sorry for ever having made him, and said: "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and the beast and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them."

Hereupon Bernal suggested that all the white rabbits at least should have been saved—thinking of his own two in the warm nest in the barn. He was unable to see how white rabbits with twitching pink noses and pink rims around their eyes could be an offense, or, indeed, other than a pure joy even to one so good as God. But he gave in, with new admiration for the ready mind of Cousin Bill J., who pointed out that white rabbits could not have been saved because they were not fish. He even relished the dry quip that maybe he, the little boy, thought white rabbits were fish; but Cousin Bill J. didn't, for his part.

Past the Tower of Babel they went, when the Lord "came down to see the city and the tower," and made them suddenly talk strange tongues to one another so they could not build their tower actually into Heaven.

The little boy thought this a fine joke to play on them, to set them all "jabbering" so.

After that there was a great deal of fighting, and, in the language of Allan's summary, "God loved all the good people so he gave them lots of wives and cattle and sheep and he let them go out and kill all the other people they wanted to which was their enemies." But the little boy found the butcheries rather monotonous.

Occasionally there was something graphic enough to excite, as where the heads of Ahab's seventy children were put into a basket and exposed in two heaps at the city's gate; but for the most part it made him sleepy.

True, when it came to getting the Children of Israel out of Egypt, as Cousin Bill J. observed, "Things brisked up considerable."

The plan of first hardening Pharaoh's heart, then scaring him by a pestilence, then again hardening his heart for another calamity, quite won the little boy's admiration for its ingenuity, and even Cousin Bill J. would at times betray that he was impressed. Feverishly they followed the miracles done to Egypt; the plague of frogs, of lice, of flies, of boils and blains on man and beast; the plague of hail and lightning, of locusts, and the three days of darkness. Then came the Lord's final triumph, which was to kill all the first-born in the land of Egypt, "from the first-born of Pharaoh, that sitteth upon the throne, even unto the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill; and all the first-born of beasts." Again the little boy's heart ached as he thought pityingly of the first-born of all white rabbits, but there was too much of excitement to dwell long upon that humble tragedy. There was the manner in which the Israelites identified themselves, by marking their doors with a sprig of hyssop dipped in the blood of a male lamb without blemish. Vividly did he see the good God gliding cautiously from door to door, looking for the mark of blood, and passing the lucky doors where it was seen to be truly of a male lamb without blemish. He thought it must have taken a lot of lambs to mark up all the doors!

Then came that master-stroke of enterprise, when God directed Moses to "speak now in the ears of the people and let every man borrow of his neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver and jewels of gold," so that they might "spoil" the Egyptians. Cousin Bill J. chuckled when he read this, declaring it to be "a regular Jew trick"; but Clytie rebuked him quickly, reminding him that they were God's own words, spoken in His own holy voice.

"Well, it was mighty thoughtful in God," insisted Cousin Bill J., but Clytie said, however that was, it served Pharaoh right for getting his heart hardened so often.