I willingly declared my respect for the intrepidity and dexterity which the mountain life insured. I applauded its health, activity, and cheerfulness. “Yet,” interrupted Jubal sternly, “what can be done while those Romans are everywhere round us?” He stopped short, reined up his horse with a sudden force that made the animal spring from the ground, flung his lance high in air, caught it in the fall, and having thus relieved his indignation, returned to discuss with me the chances of a Roman war. “Look at those,” said he, pointing to the horsemen who were now bounding across the declivities to rejoin the caravan; “their horses are flame, their bodies are iron, and their souls would be both if they had a leader.” “Eleazar is brave,” I replied. “Brave as his own lance,” was the answer; “no warmer heart, wiser head, or firmer arm moves at this hour within the borders of the land. But he despairs.” “He knows,” said I, “the Roman power and the Jewish weakness.” “Both—both, too well!” was the reply. “But he forgets the power that is in the cause of a people fighting for their law and for their rights, in the midst of glorious remembrances, nay, in the hope of a help greater than that of the sword. Look at the tract beyond those linden-trees.” [Sidenote: Jubal, the Jewish Warrior] He pointed to a broken extent of ground, darkly distinguishable from the rest of the plain. “On that ground, to this moment wearing the look of a grave, was drawn up the host of Sisera; under that ground is its grave. By this stone,” and he struck his lance on a rough pillar defaced by time, “stood Deborah the prophetess, prophesying against the thousands and tens of thousands of the heathen below. On this hill were drawn up the army of Barak, as a drop in the ocean compared with the infidel multitudes. They were the ancestors of the men whom you now see trooping before you; the men of Naphtali, with their brothers of Zebulun. On this spot they gathered their might like the storm of heaven. From this spot they poured down like its whirlwinds and lightnings upon the taunting enemy. God was their leader. They rushed upon the nine hundred scythed chariots, upon the mailed cavalry, upon the countless infantry. Of all, but one escaped from the plain of Jezreel, and that one only to perish in his flight by the degradation of a woman’s hand!” He wheeled round his foaming horse, and appealed to me. “Are the Roman legions more numerous than that host of the dead? Is Israel now less valiant, less wronged, or less indignant? Shall no prophet arise among us again? Shall it not be sung again, as it was then sung to the harps of Israel: ‘Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field’?”