narrative almost irrelevant statements of observed fact. For instance, it is recorded that when Jezebel was thrown out of the window and killed, dogs ate her up except the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet and her skull. The story seems to have no particular point, but I believe that the fact that the palms and soles were left intact may be explained by another fact previously noted, that she had just performed her toilet, and had, therefore, stained her hands and feet with henna, which is very bitter, as Eastern ladies do.
As to the head not being eaten, there is a wide-spread popular belief that dogs will not touch a human face if they can help it, and I have this much evidence in favour of the belief being true. I was shown in Shanghai in 1915 some photographs of the horrors of a massacre that had taken place shortly before. One of these photographs represented dogs eating a human corpse. They had devoured practically the whole body and limbs, but the face and head were untouched.
Many of these little observations of fact have, through the ignorance of commentators, absorbed a miraculous tinge, for instance the story of the she-bears which rent the children who mocked Elisha, that of the mess of wild gourds given by the same prophet to the sons of prophets who visited him in a time of famine, and even that of the “miraculous draught of fishes.”
She-bears are notoriously bad-tempered when prematurely roused from their winter sleep by any noise. Elisha, we may be sure, had passed on for some distance before the children shouted at him and their shouts and his disturbed the bears without any impulse from him. Elisha is not a character for whom I have any great respect except as a medicine-man, but he may be absolved of cruelty on this count. That the mess of colocynth was an attempt on the part of Elisha to poison the sons of the prophets who had waxed sarcastic on the disappearance of Elijah, there is no evidence; but if it was so, it was a very clumsy attempt; for the colocynth is only poisonous in large quantities and is so bitter that a single mouthful of food in which it was present even in small quantities would betray it immediately. The young men who partook of the
