Beauty for Ashes

ame short sentence; "They removed from Marah, and came unto Elim."1 They were together in the mind of Moses, and he just transferred them from his memory to his history. Nor is it strange that these two interesting places should be so near together in the story of the exodns, because they almost touch each other in the wilderness itself. Both of them are in the same locality, between the adjacent parallels of latitude, and in the same longitude. They are so near together, that, in the neighboring lowlands, their waters may have met, and mingled, and ffowed down in the same channel to the sea. Indeed they are only about six short miles apart; and had it not been for the intervening sand hills, while the people of Israel were murmuring at Marah they might have seen the palm- trees of Elim waving their friendly welcome, and saying, " Here is the best water in the world." Ntnvi, "Thus near to each other are the bitter and the sweet of life, the sorrow and the joy of time!" Both are in the same desert, and often follow each other in the progress of a single day. Deeply impressed with the close proximity of Marah and Elim, and the blending of the sorrows and the joys which they foreshadow, a recent traveller says: " In token of this we broke off a small branch of palm from one of these Elim trees, and laying it on the similar branch which we had brought from Marah, we tied the two together, to be kept in perpetual memorial, not merely of the scenes, but of the tr... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.