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devoted, of which we have any account in the pages of Hebrew history. Such friendships were not unknown in other histories. The story of Damon and Pythias, with its record of the heroic devotion of Damon, who, when Pythias, condemned to death, asks leave to return home and arrange his affairs, takes his place, expressing his readiness to die for his friend if Pythias should not return, is matched by other heroisms of friendship in other classic pages than those of Greece. But none of them is more beautiful in its mutual loyalty and love than the story of David and Jonathan. Three times they met to pledge to one another an undying friendship, and three times circumstances which they could not resist nor control tore them apart. But their hearts were one until the end; and when it came, the cry that the death of Jonathan wrung from the lips of David was one so poignant, so passionate, and so pathetic that to-day one cannot read it without tears.
The first of the three meetings was in