David wrote this psalm before he had risen to royal power, and while he was fleeing from his enemies from place to place, and seeking an uncertain shelter in the rock-caves. In verse 6 he enumerates some of the spots in which he has been forced to reside, far away from the altar, the priests, and the sacrifice. He has been hunted about from place to place by his enemies as a stag is hunted by the hounds, and his very soul thirsted for the distant Tabernacle, in which the Shekinah, the visible presence of God, rested on the mercy-seat between the golden. cherubim.

Wild and unsettled as was the early life of David, this was ever the reigning thought in his mind, and there is scarcely a psalm that he wrote in which we do not find some allusion to the visible presence of God among men. No matter what might be the troubles through which he had to pass, even though he trod the valley of the shadow of death, the thought of his God was soothing as water to the hunted stag, and in that thought he ever found repose. Through all his many trials and adversities, through his deep remorse for his sins, through his wounded paternal affections, through his success and prosperity, that one thought is the ruling power. He begins his career with it when he opposed Goliath: "Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel." He closes his career with the same thought, and, in the "last words" that are recorded, he charged his son to keep the commandments of the Lord, that he might do wisely all that he did.

We now come to another point in the Deer's character; namely, the watchful care of the mother over her young. She always retires to some secret place when she instinctively knows that the birth is at hand, and she hides it from all eyes until it is able to take care of itself. By some strange instinct, the little one, almost as soon as it is born, is able to comprehend the signals of its mother, and there is an instance, well known to naturalists, where a newly-born Deer, hardly an hour old, crouched low to the earth in obedience to a light tap on its shoulder from its mother's hoof. She, with the intense watchfulness of her kind, had seen a possible danger, and so warned her young one to hide itself.

There is scarcely any animal so watchful as the female Deer, as all hunters know by practical experience. It is comparatively easy to deceive the stag who leads the herd, but to evade the eyes and ears of the hinds is a very different business, and taxes all the resources of a practised hunter. If they take such care of the herd in general, it may be imagined that their watchfulness would be multiplied tenfold when the object of their anxiety is their own young.

It is in allusion to this well-known characteristic that a passage in the Book of Job refers: "Knowest thou the time. when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve?" (xxxix. 1.) A similar image is used in Psa. xxix. 9. After enumerating the wonders that are done by the voice of the Lord, the thunders and rain torrents, the devastating tempests, the forked lightning, and the earthquake that shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh," the Psalmist proceeds: "The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests,"-this being as mysterious to the writer as the more conspicuous wonders which he had previously mentioned.

So familiar to the Hebrews was the watchful care which the female Deer exercised over her young, that it forms the subject of a powerful image in one of Jeremiah's mournful prophecies: 'Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass." (xiv. 5.) To those who understand the habits of the animal, this is a most telling and picturesque image. In the first place, the Hind, a wild animal that could find food where less active creatures would starve, was reduced to such straits that she was obliged to remain in the fields at the time when her young was born, instead of retiring to some sheltered spot, according to her custom. And when it was born, instead of nurturing it carefully, according to the natural maternal instinct, she was forced from sheer hunger to abandon it in order to find a sufficiency of food for herself.

That the Deer could be tamed, and its naturally affectionate disposition cultivated, is evident from a passage in the Proverbs (v. 18, 19): “Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe."

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We might naturally expect that the Rabbinical writers would

have much to say on the subject of the Hart and Hind. Among much that is irrelevant to the object of the present work there are a few passages that deserve mention. Alluding to the annual shedding of the Deer's horns, there is a proverb respecting one who ventures his money too freely in trade, that "he has hung it on the stag's horns," meaning thereby that he will never see it again. It is remarkable that in Western Africa there is a proverb of a similar character, the imprudent merchant being told to look for his money in the place where Deer shed their horns.

They firmly believed that goats and Deer associate freely with each other, and that a mixed progeny was the result, but some of them modify this statement by saying that this only holds good with the smaller kinds of Deer, i.e. the gazelles and other antelopes. This absurd notion has evidently taken its rise from the line of long bristly hair that decorates the throat of the adult male, and which these unscientific writers took to be derived from the beard of the goat.

On account of its watchfulness it was said always to sleep with one eye open, "which is well known to be the case with the hare." The ancient Jews used to catch it with nets, and then domesticate it, feeding it principally with a plant which has a very long and straight root, which was used by Joshua as a wand of office when he pointed out to the Israelites the portion of ground on which each tribe had to encamp. What the plant might have been they cannot precisely ascertain, and the looseness of their natural history may be imagined from the fact that some consider the plant in question to be the ivy and others the sugar-cane.

Some of the Deer, says these old writers, join the herds of cattle, and even accompany them to their stalls for the night. The reason of this gentleness of disposition seems to be found in the position of the gall-bladder, which is said to be, not in the liver, but near the tail. It is remarkable, by the way, that Aristotle places it actually in the tail: "The Achaian harts have their gall in their tails;" while Pliny thinks that the gall is placed in the ears.

The curious superstitions respecting the enmity between the Deer and the serpent are of very old date, and have travelled all over the world. They probably took their rise from the