"We are praying for him," Nathan's wife would say. "Nathan and Yusuf are praying too, and we know that whatever happens must be best, since God has willed it so for us." Little Manasseh chafed more than anyone at the long suspense. One day he said: "Mother, my name means blackness, sorrow, or something like that, does it not? Why did you call me Manasseh? Was it to be an omen of my life?" "Forbid that it should!" the mother exclaimed, passing her hand lovingly through his waving hair. "It must have been because of your curls, black as a raven's wing. Sorrow will not be always. Joy may come soon; but if not, 'at eventide it shall be light.'" "Does that mean in heaven?" he asked. "He has prepared for us a mansion in the heavens, an house not made with hands. 'There shall be no night there,' and 'sorrow and sighing shall flee away,'" said the mother with a far-away look in her eyes. "But it seems so long to wait, mother," said the boy impatiently. "Yet heaven is not far away, Manasseh," she returned, quickly. "Heaven is wherever God is. And have we not him with us always? 'In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.' Never forget that, Manasseh." "Well, I wish we were a little happier now," he would say; and then, to divert the boy's attention from his present troubles, his mother would tell him about her happy home in Palestine, where she and her little sister, Lois, had watched their sheep on the green hillsides, and woven chains of flowers to put about the neck of their pet lamb; of how they grew up, and Lois married the Bedouin Musa, and had gone far away. Thus far, Yusuf knew nothing of this connection of Nathan's family with his Bedouin friends. It was yet to prove another link in the chain which was binding him so closely to this godly family. His many occupations, and the feeling which impelled him at every spare moment to seek for some clue which would lead to Nathan's liberation, left him little time for conversation with them for the present, except to see that their wants were supplied. Then, too, he was troubled about Amzi, and somewhat anxious about the result of Mohammed's proclamations, which were now beginning to be noised abroad. From holding meetings in caves and private houses, the "prophet" had begun to preach on the streets, and from the top of the little eminence Safa, near the foot of Abu Kubays. Many of the people of Mecca held him up to ridicule, and treated his declarations with derisive contempt. Among his strongest opponents were his own kindred, the Koreish, of the line of Haschem and of the rival line of Abd Schems. The head of the latter tribe, Abu Sofian, Mohammed's uncle, was especially bitter. He was a formidable foe, as he lived in the highlands, his castles being built on precipitous rocks, and manned by a set of wild and savage Arabs.