This is the day on which your husband's father fell on the mountains of Gilboa. Though I was no Israelite, but born in the desert, I was his beloved before he became king. I am eighty years old now, but the blood moves in me, and I grow warm as I think of him. There was not a goodlier person than he--from his shoulders and upwards he was higher than any of the people. Why did the Lord choose him? He never coveted that honour, and he suffered because there was laid on him that which he did not seek. Yet the Lord was right, for there was not one in all Israel so royal as he, and it was he who redeemed it and made it a nation. Samuel had grown old--he was always a priest rather than a captain--and his sons, whom he made judges, turned aside after lucre, took bribes, and perverted judgment. The people were weary of their oppression and the hand of the Amalekites and the Philistines were very heavy on the land. They therefore prayed for a king, and the thing displeased Samuel, and he tried to turn them from it. But they refused to listen to him, and when they came together at Mizpeh, Saul was the man upon whom the lot fell. Again, I say, he desired not to be king. He had hidden himself on that day, but he could not be hidden, and he was dragged forth to glory and to ruin. I was there: I heard the shouts as they cried God save the king. I saw him no more that day, for the tumult was great, and there was much for him to do. But that evening he came back to me at Gibeah; he, my Saul, came to me as anointed king. O that night! never to be forgotten, were I to live a thousand years, when I held the king in my arms! Never--no, not even on the night when I first became his--had I known such delight. I have seen more misery than has fallen to the lot of any woman in this land, and it has not passed over me senseless. I am not one of those who can go through misfortune untouched, as a drop of oil can rise through water. I have taken it all in, felt it all, to the last sting there was in it; and yet now, when I call to mind the night after he was crowned, and its rapture of an hour--the strength and the eagerness of his love: the strength, the eagerness, and the pride of mine--I say it is good that I have lived. The next morning I saw him with his valiant men--the men whose heart God had touched; how he set them in order, and how they followed him--him higher than any of them, from the shoulders upwards; and I said to myself, he is mine, the king is mine, that body of his is mine, and I am his. Tell you all about him? How can I? But I will tell you a little--what I have told you again and again before--so that you may tell it to your children, and the name of Saul may never be forgotten.