But there were patriotic women, just as there were patriotic men, during the days of decline. There was no greater suffering than that of women when they saw the Babylonian soldiery laying Jerusalem in ashes. Hugging their babes to their breasts, some were hewn in pieces, while others suffered shameful indignities and were led away among the captives, to sojourn in a strange land. The prophets had foreseen the coming anguish of the women; and when Jeremiah foretold the restoration of Israel to her land, he proclaimed that the eyes of Rachel, which had wept for her children "because they were not," should at length be dried, and her mourning turned into rejoicing. Thus the picture drawn in that elegiac poem--the greatest of all Hebrew threnodies, known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah--when he saw the sacred city in ruins, was reversed: "How doth the city sit solitary That was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, And princess among the provinces, How is she become tributary! "She weepeth sore in the night And her tears are on her cheeks: Among all her lovers She hath none to comfort: All her friends have dealt treacherously with her, They have become her enemies." This was but the enlargement and national application of the distress experienced by the women of Israel during the siege and final overthrow of the city in which all Jewish hopes centred. Of the Hebrew women during the period of the exile, we know comparatively little. And yet no woman of later Biblical Judaism made so deep an impression upon the Jewish mind as did Esther. By her beauty and the wise cunning of her uncle, she became the wife of King Ahasuerus, the famous Persian who attempted to measure arms with the Greeks--an effort which turned out so disastrously for the gigantic but undisciplined Persian army. The story of Vashti's deposal, because she refused to lend herself to the immodest proposal of the king, befuddled by the wine of banqueting and revelry; of the subsequent selection of Esther as queen; of her entreaty for her people, against whom a deep-laid and cruel plot was soon to be executed,--is a familiar narrative.