Presently the sound of battle was stilled, and the rest of darkness fell on the combatants.

But as the tidings spread of the death of their king, the people must have recalled the prophecy of Micaiah. And the

very remembrance of it led to its literal fulfillment. For through the host ran the proclamation which scattered them as

sheep that have not a shepherd: "Every man to his city, and every man to his own country."

While one prophecy was thus translated into fact, the knell of yet another was sounding in the hearing of the house of

Ahab, had they but had ears to hear it. Through the darkness speeded the chariot that bore the dead body of Ahab, lying

on its bloody bed. They reached Samaria, and there they buried their king. But the chariot full of his gore they took

outside, to wash in the pool by the city. And, horrible to behold, in the pale moonlight the wild masterless dogs, which

in the East prowl at night about the cit y-walls, lapped up the water mingled with gore which flowed out of the blood-

dyed chariot as they washed it. And stranger and still more horrible, the red flood in large eddying circles mingled with

the waters of the pool - that pool where "the harlots was hed,"80 - no doubt where Jezebel's priestesses of Astarte, the

ministers of the worship of debauchery, nightly performed their semi -religious ablutions in that sacred fishpond,81

which here, as in all other places where the Syrian Astarte was worshipped, had been constructed and consecrated to

the goddess.

What a coincidence, and how full of deepest significance! But did Ahab's successor not think of the blood of Naboth,

and the curse which rested on Ahab, not only as the murderer of Naboth, but as he who had seduced Israel into idolatry

and all sin? And did Jezebel not see in this red flood, in which her priestesses of the worship of impurity performed

their sacred ablutions, a warning token of that judgment which was gathering, like a dark cloud, over her own head?

But as yet these judgments of the LORD slumbered. "So Ahab slept with his fathers, and Ahaziah his son reigned in his