What a touch of human nature there is in the scene between Samson and his wife, when she asks for the solution of that wretched riddle! "Thou dost but hate me," is her reproach, "and lovest me not; thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people, and hast not told it to me." What! is there a domestic storm already brewing? There is something of a thunderclap in the angry retort of the husband: "Behold, I have not told it to my father and my mother," (as if that would make any difference to her!) "and shall I tell it to thee?" Comparisons of this sort are but little noted for their conciliatory tendencies, and so we are fully prepared for what follows: "_And she wept before him_ the seven days while the feast lasted." Poor Samson is not proof against woman's tears. He could rend the lion as a kid, and carry off the gates of Gaza as easily as a shepherd could bear a lamb upon his shoulders, but his superhuman strength is of no avail against "women's weapons, water-drops." We are not surprised to find that "it came to pass on the seventh day _he told her_." Thus did conjugal quarrels end in the time of the Judges. But if Samson was worsted in the encounter with his wife, he scored a victory against the Philistines who had frightened her into telling them the answer to the riddle. When they came with an air of insolent triumph and said: "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" he rather impolitely retorted,--traces of gall and wormwood at his recent humiliation by his wife still rankling in his mind,--"If ye had not ploughed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle." But he paid the debt of honor he owed them, the wager he had lost. "He went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil and gave changes of raiment unto them which expounded the riddle." Thersites would have said of him as he did of Achilles, "His wit was his sinew." Samson had wonderful muscular power of repartee.