Two of the most celebrated historic rivers are the Abana and Pharpar. These streams begin their course under the most promising auspices. Their source is in Lebanon. The Abana, now called the Barada, is the pride and joy of the plain below. It forces its way from the declivity where it has its cradle through a rocky barrier and spreads out fan-like in seven streams over the plain. “Everything lives whither the river cometh.” A meadow, in which the whole Oriental world exults, holds in its lap Damascus, the most beautiful garden city in the world. Its many minarets and domes tower up above the countless bowers in the courts of the old houses. Abana still as ever sustains this fruitfulness and splendor. But only a few miles from its source its waters are exhausted, for the desert swallows it, and the Pharpar also. Both die, forming great swamps and evaporating.

So it is with many human beings whose lives are for a few years efficient and full of promise and even performance, only very soon to flag and fade and to fall into utter desuetude. (Text.)

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See [Great Men’s Beginnings].

EARLY RELIGION

The Bible was once compared to a great tree, with its books as branches, its chapters as twigs, and the verses as leaves. A minister, addressing a Sunday-school gathering, announced his text as “on the 39th branch, the 3d twig, and the 17th leaf.” He said to his great audience, “Try to find my text.” A little lad who was in the pulpit, owing to the crowded state of the church, answered “Malachi, third chapter, and seventeenth verse.” The minister said, “Right, my boy; take my place and read it out.” It so happened the boy’s brother had died recently, and the sight of the little curly-headed lad, only eleven years old, with his little black gloves reading in silvery tones, “And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels,” brought tears to many eyes. The minister laid his hand on the boy and said, “Well done; I hope one day you will be a minister.” The lad was Henry Drummond, afterward the loved teacher of thousands in America and Great Britain. (Text.)

(849)

See [Religion, Early].

EARNESTNESS

Professor Ticknor, speaking in one of his letters of the intense excitement with which he listened to Webster’s Plymouth address, says: