Azariah told him how he had taken it from a Greek on the field of battle. “And saw you this?” he went on, pointing to the Holy Name which had been engraved on the blade. “Doubtless this belonged to some Hebrew warrior in time past, for the fashion of the letters is somewhat antique; the heathen whom you slew had taken it, and now the Lord has given it back into the hands of the faithful.” Azariah then related his dream. “The angel whom you saw,” said Judas, “was, doubtless, the angel of battle, and the Lord has been faithful, as ever, to His promise.” He gave back the consecrated sword to Azariah, and took the weapon which was still grasped in the right hand of the dead Apollonius. “With this,” he said, “I will fight as long as I live.” And he broke out into the triumphal chant of the Psalmist—“The ungodly have drawn out the sword, and have bent the bow to cast down the poor and needy. Their sword shall go through their own heart and their bow shall be broken.” [Illustration: _The Sword of Apollonius._] CHAPTER XVI. NEWS FROM THE BATTLE-FIELD. While the patriots, bivouacking on the field of battle, slept the sound sleep of those who have fought a good fight, the women, left, with the children and the sick, in charge of a small guard, only strong enough to protect them against casual robbers, felt the most intense anxiety. Ruth in her cave, with the children slumbering by her side, watched through the night, listening intently to every sound. At one time she could hear the bats which haunted the rocks flapping and fluttering as they went out to take their flights in the night air. Then from farther away came the moaning of the jackals, as they hunted for their prey, with now and then the deeper note of a wolf, or the sound, so strangely like to mocking laughter, of the hooting owls. Everything at that moment seemed very dark and hopeless to the anxious wife. “’Tis everywhere the same,” she thought to herself—“the stronger hunt and devour the weak. The lions roaring after their prey, do seek their meat from God. The lambs and the fawns are their prey, and God gives the helpless, innocent things into their jaws. And will he give us to the jaws of the heathen who are hunting us that they may devour us? Did He deliver the thousand who died that they might not profane His Sabbath? Not so. He suffered them to perish, to be a prey for the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. ‘Verily our bones lie scattered before the pit, like as when one breaketh and heweth wood upon the earth.’”