‘The old order changeth, giving place to new,’ and many and bewildering have been such changes since the daughters of Zelophehad trooped down before the elders of Israel to plead for women’s rights. The claim of those five fatherless, husbandless sisters to ‘have a possession among the brethren of our father’ has been brought, and has been answered since in a thousand different ways, but the chivalrous spirit in which it was met then seems, in a subtle sort of way, to symbolise the attitude of Israel to unprotected womanhood, and to suggest the type of character which ensured such ready and respectful consideration. It is curious and interesting in these modern days to take up what Heine called the ‘family chronicle of the Jews,’ and to find, as in a long gallery of family portraits, the type repeating itself through every variety of ‘treatment’ and costume. Clear and distinct they stand out, the long line of our Jewish maids and matrons, not ‘faultily faultless’ by any means, yet presenting in their vigorous lovableness a delightful continuity of wholesome womanhood, an unbroken line of fit claimants for fitting woman’s rights. Foremost among all heroines of all love tales comes, of course, she whose long wooing seemed ‘but as a few days’ to her young lover, so strong and so steadfast was the worship she won. To the young, that maiden ‘by the well’s mouth’ will stand always for favourite text and familiar illustration, but to older folks the sad-eyed _mater dolorosa_ of the Old Testament is to the full as interesting and as suggestive an ideal. One pictures her with sackcloth for sole couch and covering spread upon the bare rocks, selfless and tireless, through the heat of early harvest days till chill autumn rains ‘dropped upon them,’ scaring ‘the birds of the air and the beasts of the field’ from her unburied dead. And then, as corrective to the pathos of Rizpah and the romance of Rachel, the sweet, homely figure of Ruth is at hand to suggest a whole volume of virtues of the comfortable, everyday sort; the one character, perhaps, in all story who ever addressed an impassioned outburst of affection to her mother-in-law, and then lived up to it. But the solitariness of the circumstance notwithstanding, and for all the fact that she was a Moabitess born, Ruth, in the practical nature of her good qualities, is a typical Jewish heroine. For what strikes one most in the record of these long ago dead women is that there is so much sense in their sentiment, so much backbone to their gentleness and simple-mindedness. They do little things in a great way instead of attacking great things feebly. Their womanhood in its entire naturalness belongs to no especial school, fits in to no especial groove of thought. The same peg serves for a Solomon or a Wordsworth, for an aphorism or a sonnet. The woman whose ‘price was above rubies,’ and she who was ‘Not too great or good For human nature’s daily food,’