"No, we will not write it, lest the flies read it and buzz it into the ears of men." "Crack a stone then, and each carry a half, in pledge that each will fit himself into the other's plans, as one part of the stone fits into the other." A broken bit from the stone parapet that surrounded the roof was cracked in two. Each placed a piece in his wallet, and, with many wishes for mutual success, the young men parted. CHAPTER XXIV. The town of Samaria crowned the hill that rises from the centre of a magnificent valley, like an inverted cup in a lordly dish. Far away to the east stand the mountain walls of Gilead and Ammon and Moab; while on the west stretch the uplands of Ephraim and the gleaming waters of the Great Sea. The nearer hills, terraced into gigantic steps, and ordinarily luxuriant with vineyards and fig gardens, were now covered with rankest vegetation of wild growth, at once nature's rebuke and invitation to the husbandman. The old palace of Ahab, built with bankrupting magnificence by that renegade king of Israel, had long since fallen to ruin. Hard by stood a sarcophagus in which had once rested the spice-embalmed body of some fair princess, but which was now the feeding-trough for a herd of swine. A superb pillar of porphyry, polished until it had once reflected the gay lights that flashed about it, was now a scratching-post for the cattle that roamed at will through the valley. Since the Persian king had appointed Sanballat, the Moabite chieftain, to be satrap of Samaria, the land had been somewhat improved. The bats had been frightened out of the niches in the palace. The storks no longer sat enthroned upon the stately columns, nor posed upon one leg, with drooping wings, looking down lugubriously upon the passer-by--the symbolic funeral directors of dead empires since time began. The great cedar roof that once spanned the hall had been succeeded by a double awning of canvas--the outer covering of black goat's hair, the inner of white linen, upon which were wrought tapestries whose gay colors compensated for their rude forms. By the side of the grand doorway, with its enormous lintels and cracked cross-piece of stone, stood the tall banner-staff of the satrap, in sight of a hundred tents which sheltered the standing army of Samaria. This band of braves was composed chiefly of Moabitish men, swarthy, long-limbed, with treacherous looks, as if seeking to repel the historic taunt of their ill-begetting as a race from the incestuous daughter of Lot. Their officers were lithe and gallant Persians, each one of whom boasted the various deeds he would have performed if the last expedition against the Greeks had not been chiefly a naval affair. More plausible, perhaps, were their stories of hair-breadth escapes in their adventures connected with the harems of Babylon and Susa.