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races and ranks of men—it all began, that bright, splendid, and though, alas! not unstained, yet eternally instructive, even as it is infinitely pathetic, career, with that first choice of weapons.
But long before that splendid career had approached its zenith there happened the meeting of David and Jonathan in the wood of Ziph.
And that brings me to Jonathan—a character so noble and beautiful that one has rarely been found to match it. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul, and a man of magnificent powers as a fighter. The story of the garrison at Michmash is a specimen of what he could do, and it is a story well worth reading. I may not tell it here, but this is the end of it: “And that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armor-bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were a half-acre of land, which a yoke of oxen might plough” (1 Samuel, xiv. 14). Two against twenty at least, and twenty dead on the field. “It was like
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