Hatred, boys and girls, is a very ugly as it is a very headstrong fault; but as there is a good side even to a bad habit, so there is a hatred which may rise to the heighth of a virtue. Hatred of vice IS virtue; hatred of tyranny is patriotism. It is this which has led the world from slavery to freedom, from ignorance to enlightenment, and inspired the words that have found immortality alike above the ashes of Bradshaw the regicide and of Jefferson the American. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. But how could a fatherless boy and girl, away off on the edge of an Arabian desert, hope to resist successfully the mighty power of Imperial Rome? The story of their lives will tell. If there are some people who are patriots, there are others who are poltroons, and such a one was Hairan, the elder brother of young Odhainat, when, succeeding to his dead father’s wealth and power, he thought less of Roman tyranny than of Roman gold. “Revenge ourselves on their purses, my brother, and not on their pikes,” he said. “‘T is easier and more profitable to sap the Roman’s gold than to shed the Roman’s blood.” But this submission to Rome only angered Odhainat, and to such a conflict of opinion did it lead that at last Hairan drove his younger brother from the home of his fathers, and the lad, “an Esau among the Jacobs of Tadmor,” so the record tells us, spent his youth amid the roving Bedaween of the Arabian deserts and the mountaineers of the Armenian hills, waiting his time. But, though a homeless exile, the dark-eyed Bath Zabbai did not forget him. In the palace of another kinsman, Septimus Worod, the “lord of the markets,” she gave herself up to careful study, and hoped for the day of Palmyra’s freedom. As rich in powers of mind as in the graces of form and face, she soon became a wonderful scholar for those distant days--mistress of four languages: Coptic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek, while the fiery temper of the girl grew into the nobler ambitions of the maiden. But above all things, as became her mingled Arabic and Egyptian blood--for she could trace her ancestry back to the free chiefs of the Arabian desert, and to the dauntless Cleopatra of Egypt,--she loved the excitement of the chase, and in the plains and mountains beyond the city she learned to ride and hunt with all the skill and daring of a young Diana.