THE BROOK KERITH

A SYRIAN STORY

BY GEORGE MOORE

1916

A DEDICATION

My dear Mary Hunter. It appears that you wished to give me a book for Christmas, but were in doubt what book to give me as I seemed to have little taste for reading, so in your embarrassment you gave me a Bible. It lies on my table now with the date 1898 on the fly-leaf—my constant companion and chief literary interest for the last eighteen years. Itself a literature, it has led me into many various literatures and into the society of scholars.

I owe so much to your Bible that I cannot let pass the publication of "The Brook Kerith" without thanking you for it again. Yours always, George Moore.

THE BROOK KERITH

CHAP. I.

It was at the end of a summer evening, long after his usual bedtime, that Joseph, sitting on his grandmother's knee, heard her tell that Kish having lost his asses sent Saul, his son, to seek them in the land of the Benjamites and the land of Shalisha, whither they might have strayed. But they were not in these lands, Son, she continued, nor in Zulp, whither Saul went afterwards, and being then tired out with looking for them he said to the servant: we shall do well to forget the asses, lest my father should ask what has become of us. But the servant, being of a mind that Kish would not care to see them without the asses, said to young Saul: let us go up into yon city, for a great seer lives there and he will be able to put us in the right way to come upon the asses. But we have little in our wallet to recompense him, Saul answered, only half a loaf and a little wine at the end of the bottle. We have more than that, the servant replied, and opening his hand he showed a quarter of a shekel of silver to Saul, who said: he will take that in payment. Whereupon they walked into Arimathea, casting their eyes about for somebody to direct them to the seer's house. And seeing some maidens at the well, come to draw water, they asked them if the seer had been in the city that day, and were answered that he had been seen and would offer sacrifice that morning, as had been announced. He must be on his way now to the high rock, one of the maidens cried after them, and they pressed through the people till none was in front of them but an old man walking alone, likewise in the direction of the rock; and overtaking him they asked if he could point out the seer's house to them, to which he answered sharply: I am the seer, and fell at once to gazing on Saul as if he saw in him the one that had been revealed to him. For you see, Son, seers have foresight, and the seer had been warned overnight that the Lord would send a young man to him, so the moment he saw Saul he knew him to be the one the Lord had promised, and he said: thou art he whom the Lord has promised to send me for anointment, but more than that I cannot tell thee, being on my way to offer sacrifice, but afterwards we will eat together, and all that has been revealed to me I will tell. You understand me, Son, the old woman crooned, the Lord had been with Samuel beforetimes and had promised to send the King of Israel to him for anointment, and the moment he laid eyes on Saul he knew him to be the king; and that was why he asked him to eat with him after sacrifice. Yes, Granny, I understand: but did the Lord set the asses astray that Saul might follow them and come to Samuel to be made a King? I daresay there was something like that at the bottom of it, the old woman answered, and continued her story till her knees ached under the boy's weight.

The child's asleep, she said, and on the instant he awoke crying: no, Granny, I wasn't asleep. I heard all you said and would like to be a prophet. A prophet, Joseph, and to anoint a king? But there are no more prophets or kings in Israel. And now, Joseph, my little prophet, 'tis bedtime and past it. Come. I didn't say I wanted to anoint kings, he answered, and refused to go to bed, though manifestly he could hardly keep awake. I'll wait up for Father.

Now what can the child want his father for at this hour? she muttered as she went about the room, not guessing that he was angry and resentful, that her words had wounded him deeply and that he was asking himself, in his corner, if she thought him too stupid to be a prophet.

I'll tell thee no more stories, she said to him, but he answered that he did not want to hear her stories, and betwixt feelings of anger and shame his head drooped, and he slept in his chair till the door opened and his father's footsteps crossed the threshold.

Now, he said to himself, Granny will tell Father that I said I'd like to be a prophet. And feigning sleep he listened, determined to hear the worst that could be said of him. But they did not speak about him but of the barrels of salt fish that were to go to Beth-Shemish on the morrow; which was their usual talk. So he slipped from his chair and bade his father good-night. A resentful good-night it was; and his good-night to his grandmother was still more resentful. But she found an excuse for his rudeness, saying that his head was full of sleep—a remark that annoyed him considerably and sent him upstairs wishing that women would not talk about things they do not understand. I'll ask Father in the morning why Granny laughed at me for saying I'd like to be a prophet. But as morning seemed still a long way ahead he tried to find a reason, but could find no better one than that prophets were usually old men. But I shall be old in time to come and have a beard. Father has a beard and they can't tell that I won't have a beard, and a white one too, so why should they—

His senses were numbing, and he must have fallen asleep soon after, for when he awoke it seemed to him that he had been asleep a long time, several hours at least, so many things had happened or seemed to have happened; but as he recovered his mind all the dream happenings melted away, and he could remember only his mother. She had been dead four years, but in his dream she looked as she had always looked, and had scolded Granny for laughing at him. He tried to remember what else she had said but her words faded out of his mind and he fell asleep again. In this second sleep an old man rose up by his bedside and told him that he was the prophet Samuel, who though he had been dead a thousand years had heard him say he would like to be a prophet. But shall I be a prophet? Joseph asked, and as Samuel did not answer he cried out as loudly as he could: shall I? shall I?

What ails thee, Son? he heard his grandmother calling to him, and he answered: an old man, an old man. Ye are dreaming, she mumbled between sleeping and waking. Go to sleep like a good boy, and don't dream any more. I will, Granny, and don't be getting up; the bed-clothes don't want settling. I am well tucked in, he pleaded; and fell asleep praying that Granny had not heard him ask Samuel if he would be a prophet.

A memory of his dream of Samuel came upon him while she dressed him, and he hoped she had forgotten all about it; but his father mentioned at breakfast that he had been awakened by cries. It was Joseph crying out in his dream, Dan, disturbed thee last night: such cries, "Shall I? Shall I?" And when I asked "What ails thee?" the only answer I got was "An old man."

Dan, Joseph's father, wondered why Joseph should seem so disheartened and why he should murmur so perfunctorily that he could not remember his dream. But if he had forgotten it, why trouble him further? If we are to forget anything it were well that we should choose our dreams; at which piece of incredulity his mother shook her head, being firm in the belief that there was much sense in dreams and that they could be interpreted to the advantage of everybody.

Dan said: if that be so, let him tell thee his dream. But Joseph hung his head and pushed his plate away; and seeing him so morose they left him to his sulks and fell to talking of dreams that had come true. Joseph had never heard them speak of anything so interesting before, and though he suspected that they were making fun of him he could not do else than listen, till becoming convinced suddenly that they were talking in good earnest without intention of fooling him he began to regret that he had said he had forgotten his dream, and rapped out: he was the prophet Samuel. Now what are you saying, Joseph? his father asked. Joseph would not say any more, but it pleased him to observe that neither his father nor his granny laughed at his admission, and seeing how interested they were in his dream he said: if you want to know all, Samuel said he had heard me say that I'd like to be a prophet. That was why he came back from the dead. But, Father, is it true that we are his descendants? He said that I was.

A most extraordinary dream, his father answered, for it has always been held in the family that we are descended from him. Do you really mean, Joseph, that the old man you saw in your dream told you he was Samuel and that you were his descendant? How should I have known if he hadn't told me? Joseph looked from one to the other and wondered why they had kept the secret of his ancestor from him. You laughed at me yesterday, Granny, when I said I'd like to be a prophet. Now what do you say? Answer me that. And he continued to look from one to the other for an answer. But neither had the wit to find an answer, so amazed were they at the news that the prophet Samuel had visited Joseph in a dream; and satisfied at the impression he had made and a little frightened by their silence Joseph stole out of the room, leaving his parents to place whatever interpretation they pleased on his dream. Nor did he care whether they believed he had spoken the truth. He was more concerned with himself than with them, and conscious that something of great importance had happened to him he ascended the stairs, pausing at every step uncertain if he should return to ask for the whole of the story of Saul's anointment. It seemed to him to lack courtesy to return to the room in which he had seen the prophet, till he knew these things. But he could not return to ask questions: later he would learn what had happened to Samuel and Saul, and he entered the room, henceforth to him a sacred room, and stood looking through it, having all the circumstances of his dream well in mind: he was lying on his left side when Samuel had risen up before him, and it was there, upon that spot, in that space he had seen Samuel. His ancestor had seemed to fade away from the waist downwards, but his face was extraordinarily clear in the darkness, and Joseph tried to recall it. But he could only remember it as a face that a spirit might wear, for it was not made up of flesh but of some glowing matter or stuff, such as glow-worms are made of; nor could he call it ugly or beautiful, for it was not of this world. He had drawn the bed-clothes over his head, but—impelled he knew not why, for he was nearly dead with fright—he had poked his head out to see if the face was still there. The lips did not move, but he had heard a voice. The tones were not like any heard before, but he had listened to them all the same, and if he had not lost his wits again in an excess of fear he would have put questions to Samuel: he would have put questions if his tongue had not been tied back somewhere in the roof of his mouth. But the next time he would not be frightened and pull the bed-clothes over his head.

And convinced of his own courage he lay night after night thinking of all the great things he would ask the old man and of the benefit he would derive from his teaching. But Samuel did not appear again, perhaps because the nights were so dark. Joseph was told the moon would become full again, but sleep closed his eyes when he should have been waking, and in the morning he was full of fear that perhaps Samuel had come and gone away disappointed at not finding him awake. But that could not be, for if the prophet had come he would have awakened him as he had done before. His ancestor had not come again: a reasonable thing to suppose, for when the dead return to the earth they do so with much pain and difficulty; and if the living, whom they come to instruct, cannot keep their eyes open, the poor dead wander back and do not try to come between their descendants and their fate again.

But I will keep awake, he said, and resorted to all sorts of devices, keeping up a repetition of a little phrase: he will come to-night when the moon is full; and lying with one leg hanging out of bed; and these proving unavailing he strewed his bed with crumbs. But no ancestor appeared, and little by little he relinquished hope of ever being able to summon Samuel to his bedside, and accepted as an explanation of his persistent absence that Samuel had performed his duty by coming once to visit him and would not come again unless some new necessity should arise. It was then that the conviction began to mount into his brain that he must learn all that his grandmother could tell him about Saul and David, and learning from her that they had been a great trouble to Samuel he resolved never to allow a thought into his mind that the prophet would deem unworthy. To become worthy of his ancestor was now his aim, and when he heard that Samuel was the author of two sacred books it seemed to him that his education had been neglected: for he had not yet been taught to read. Another step in his advancement was the discovery that the language his father, his granny and himself spoke was not the language spoken by Samuel, and every day he pressed his grandmother to tell him why the Jews had lost their language in Babylon, till he exhausted the old woman's knowledge and she said: well now, Son, if you want to hear any more about Babylon you must ask your father, for I have told you all I know. And Joseph waited eagerly for his father to come home, and plagued him to tell him a story.

But after a long day spent in the counting-house his father was often too tired to take him on his knee and instruct him, for Joseph's curiosity was unceasing and very often wearisome. Now, Joseph, his father said, you will learn more about these things when you are older. And why not now? he asked, and his grandmother answered that it was change of air that he wanted and not books; and they began to speak of the fierce summer that had taken the health out of all of them, and of how necessary it was for a child of that age to be sent up to the hills.

Dan looked into his son's face, and Rachel seemed to be right. A thin, wan little face, that the air of the hills will brighten, he said; and he began at once to make arrangements for Joseph's departure for a hill village, saying that the pastoral life of the hills would take his mind off Samuel, Hebrew and Babylon. Rachel was doubtful if the shepherds would absorb Joseph's mind as completely as his father thought. She hoped, however, that they would. As soon as he hears the sound of the pipe, his father answered. A prophecy this was, for while Joseph was resting after the fatigue of the journey, he was awakened suddenly by a sound he had never heard before, and one that interested him strangely. His nurse told him that the sound he was hearing was a shepherd's pipe. The shepherd plays and the flock follows, she said. And when may I see the flock coming home with the shepherd? he asked. To-morrow evening, she answered, and the time seemed to him to loiter, so eager was he to see the flocks returning and to watch the she-goat milked.

And in the spring as his strength came back he followed the shepherds and heard from them many stories of wolves and dogs, and from a shepherd lad, whom he had chosen as a companion, he acquired knowledge of the plumage and the cries and the habits of birds, and whither he was to seek their nests: it had become his ambition to possess all the wild birds' eggs, one that was easily satisfied till he came to the egg of the cuckoo, which he sought in vain, hearing of it often, now here, now there, till at last he and the shepherd lad ventured into a dangerous country in search of it and remained there till news of their absence reached Magdala and Dan set out in great alarm with an armed escort to recover his son. He was very angry when he came upon him, but the trouble he had been put to and the ransom he had had to pay were very soon forgotten, so great was his pleasure at the strong healthy boy he brought back with him, and whose first question to Rachel was: are there cuckoos in Magdala?—Father doesn't know. His grandmother could not tell him, but she was willing to make inquiries, but before any news of the egg had been gotten the hope to possess it seemed to have drifted out of Joseph's mind and to seem even a little foolish when he looked into his box, for many of his egg shells had been broken on the journey. See, Granny, he said, but on second thoughts he refused to show his chipped possessions. But thou wast once as eager to learn Hebrew, his grandmother said, and the chance words, spoken as she left the room, awakened his suspended interests. As soon as she returned she was beset by questions, and the same evening his father had to promise that the best scribe in Galilee should be engaged to teach him: a discussion began between Dan and Rachel as to the most notable and trustworthy, and it was followed by Joseph so eagerly that they could not help laughing; the questions he put to them regarding the different accomplishments of the scribes were very minute, and the phrase—But this one is a Greek scholar, stirred his curiosity. Why should he be denied me because he knows Greek? he asked, and his father could only answer that no one can learn two languages at the same time. But if he knows two languages, Joseph insisted. I cannot tell thee more, his father answered, than that the scribe I've chosen is a great Hebrew scholar.

He was no doubt a great scholar, but he was not the man that Joseph wished for: thin and tall and of gentle appearance and demeanour, he did not stir up a flame for work in Joseph, who, as soon as the novelty of learning Hebrew had worn off, began to hide himself in the garden. His father caught him one day sitting in a convenient bough, looking down upon his preceptor fairly asleep on a bench; and after this adventure he began to make a mocking stock of his preceptor, inventing all kinds of cruelties, and his truancy became so constant that his father was forced to choose another. This time a younger man was chosen, but he succeeded with Joseph not very much better than the first. After the second there came a third, and when Joseph began to complain of his ignorance his father said:

Well, Joseph, you said you wanted to learn Hebrew, and you have shown no application, and three of the most learned scribes in Galilee have been called in to teach you.

Joseph felt the reproof bitterly, but he did not know how to answer his father and he was grateful to his grandmother for her answer. Joseph isn't an idle boy, Dan, but his nature is such that he cannot learn from a man he doesn't like. Why don't ye give him Azariah as an instructor? Has he been speaking to thee about Azariah? Dan asked. Maybe, she said, and Dan's face clouded.

CHAP. II.

We are to understand, Son, Dan said, on hearing that the fourth preceptor whom he had engaged to teach his son Hebrew had failed to give satisfaction, that you cannot learn from anybody but Azariah. Now, will you tell us what there is in Azariah more than in Shimshai, Benaiah or Zebad? and he waited for his son to speak, but as Joseph did not answer he asked: is it because he looks more like a prophet than any of the others? And Joseph, who still dreaded any allusion to prophets, turned into his corner mortified. But Rachel came forward directly and taking the child by the shoulders led him back to his father, asking Dan with a trace of anger in her voice why he should think it strange that the child should prefer to learn from Azariah rather than from a withered patriarch who never could keep his eyes open but always sat dozing in his chair like one in a dream.

It wasn't, Granny, because he went to sleep often; I could have kept him awake by kicking him under the table. Joseph stopped suddenly and looked from one to the other. Why then? his father asked, and on being pressed to say why he didn't want to learn Hebrew he said he had come to hate Hebrew, an admission which rendered his parents speechless for a moment. Come to hate Hebrew, they repeated one after the other till frightened by their solemnity Joseph blurted out: you wouldn't like Hebrew if the scholar's fleas jumped on to you the moment you began. And pulling up his sleeves Joseph exhibited his arms. How could I learn Hebrew with three fleas biting me and all at one time, one here, another there and a third down yonder. He always has three or four about him. No, Father, don't, don't ask me to learn Hebrew any more. But, Joseph, all Hebrew scholars haven't fleas about them. An unbelieving face confronted them, and Joseph looked as if he were uncertain whether he should laugh or cry: but seeing that his parents liked his story he began to laugh. We've tried several preceptors but you're hard to please, Joseph. Now what fault did you find with—and while Dan searched his memory for the name Joseph interjected that the little fellow whose back bulged like Granny's chest wouldn't let him read the interesting parts of the Scriptures but kept him always at the Psalms and the Proverbs. And he was always telling me about Hillel, who was a good man, but good men aren't as interesting as prophets, Joseph rapped out. And wilt thou tell us what he told thee about these pious men? Dan asked, a smile playing about his long thin mouth. That the law didn't matter as long as we were virtuous, Joseph muttered, and he was always explaining the stories that I understood quite well when Granny told them. So it was Hiram that confirmed you in your distaste for Hebrew, Dan said, and the child stood looking at his father, not quite sure if it would be in his interest to accept or repudiate the suggestion. He would have refused to give a direct answer (such is the way of children) but the servant relieved him of his embarrassment: Azariah was at the gate asking for shelter from the rain.

From the rain! Dan said, rising suddenly. It is coming down very fast, Mother, but we were so engaged in listening to Joseph that we didn't hear it. Shall we ask him in, Joseph? The child's face lighted up. Now isn't it strange, Rachel said, he should be here to-day? We haven't seen him for months, and now in the middle of a talk about tutors—aren't you going to ask him in? Of course, Dan said, and he instructed the servant to ask the scribe to come upstairs. And now, Joseph, I hope you'll listen to all that Azariah says, giving quiet and reasonable answers. And not too many questions, mind!

Joseph promised to be good and quiet and to keep himself from putting questions. I will listen attentively, he said, and he seized on the last chance available to his tongue to tell that he had often seen Azariah in the lanes. He doesn't see us, he walks like one in a dream, his hair blowing in the wind. But when he does see us he speaks very kindly ... I think I'd like to learn Hebrew from him. Rachel laid her finger on her lips; the door opened and Azariah advanced into the room with a long grave Jewish stride, apologising to Dan as he came for his sudden intrusion into their midst, mentioning the heavy rain in a graceful phrase. Joseph, who was on the watch for everything, could see that his father was full of respect for Azariah, and hearing him say that it was some years since Azariah had been in his house he began to wonder if there had been a quarrel between them; it seemed to him that his father was a little afraid of Azariah, which was strange, for he himself did not feel in the least afraid of Azariah but an almost uncontrollable desire to go and sit on his knee.

Here is my boy Joseph: and, Azariah, you will be interested to hear that we were talking about you for the last quarter of an hour.

Azariah raised his thick eyebrows and waited to be told how he had come to be the subject of their talk, though he half knew the reason, for in a village like Magdala it soon gets about that four preceptors have been sent away unable to teach the rich man's son. He has made up his mind, Dan said, to learn Hebrew and Greek from none but you. No, Father, I didn't make up my mind. But I couldn't learn from the others and I told you why. Are you sure that you can learn from me? Azariah asked. Joseph became shy at once, but he liked to feel Azariah's friendly hand upon his shoulder, and when Dan asked the scribe to be seated Joseph followed him, and standing beside his chair asked him if he would teach him Hebrew, a question Azariah did not answer. You will teach me, he insisted, and Dan and Rachel kept silence, so that they might better observe Joseph working round Azariah with questions; and they were amused, for Joseph's curiosity had overcome his shyness; and, quite forgetful of his promise to listen and not to talk, he had begun to beg the scribe to tell him if the language they spoke had been brought back from Babylon, and how long it was since people had ceased to speak Hebrew. Azariah set himself to answer these questions; Joseph gave him close attention, and when Azariah ceased speaking he said: when may I begin my lessons? And he put the question so innocently that his father could not help laughing. But, Joseph, he said, Azariah has not yet promised to teach you, and I wouldn't advise him to try to teach a boy that has refused to learn from four preceptors. But it will be different with you, Sir, Joseph murmured, taking Azariah's hand. You will teach me, won't you? When will you begin?

Azariah answered that it could not be this week, for he was going to Arimathea. The town we came from, Dan said. I am still known as Dan of Arimathea, though I have lived here twenty years. I too shall be known as Joseph of Arimathea, Joseph interjected. I'd like to be Joseph of Arimathea much better than Joseph of Magdala.

You needn't shake your head at Magdala, Dan said. Magdala has done well for us. To which Joseph answered nothing, but it was not long, however, before he went to his father saying that he would like to go to Arimathea, and in charge of Azariah.

You are asking too much, Joseph, his father answered him. No, I don't think I am, and his honour Azariah doesn't think so, Joseph cried, for his heart was already set upon this holiday. Azariah has perhaps promised to teach you Hebrew. Isn't that enough? his father remarked. Now you want him to take you to Arimathea. But if he likes to take me, Joseph replied, and he cast such a winning glance at Azariah that the scribe was moved to say that he would be glad to take charge of the boy if his parents would confide him to his care. Whereupon Joseph threw his arms about his father, but finding him somewhat indifferent he went to his grandmother, who welcomed his embrace, and in return for it pleaded that the boy should not be denied this small pleasure. But Dan, who only half liked to part with his son, tried to hide his feelings from his mother, who had guessed them already, with a joke, saying to Azariah that he was a brave man to undertake the charge of so wayward a boy. I shall not spoil him, and if he fails to obey he'll have to find someone else to teach him Hebrew, Azariah answered. I think the rain is now over, he said. Some drops were still falling but the sky was brightening, and he returned from the window to where Joseph was standing, and laying his hand on his head promised to come for him in the morning.

We shall hear no more about fleas preventing thee from study, Dan said to his son, and very much offended Joseph withdrew to his room, and stood looking at the spot in which he had seen Samuel, asking himself if the prophet would appear to him in Arimathea and if it would be by the fountain whither the maidens used to come to draw water. Samuel and the maidens seemed to jar a little, and as he could not think of them together he fell to thinking of the rock on which the seer used to offer sacrifices. It was still there and somebody would be about to direct them to it, and it would be under this rock that Azariah would read to him all that Samuel had said to Saul. But we shall be riding all day, he said to himself, Arimathea must be a long long way from here, and he fled downstairs to ask his father if Azariah would call for him at the head of a caravan, whether he would ride on a camel or a mule or a horse: he thought he would like to ride a camel, and awoke many times in the night, once rolling out of his bed, for in a dream the ungainly animal had jolted him from off his hump.

And the old woman's patience was nigh exhausted when he cried: Granny, it is day, and bade her leave her bed and come to the window to tell him if day were not breaking; but she answered: get thee back to thy bed, for 'tis the moon shining down the sky, simpleton. The sun won't give way an hour to the moon nor the moon an hour to the sun because thou'rt going to Arimathea. And methinks, Joseph, that to some the morrow is always better than to-day, and yesterday better than either,—a remark that puzzled Joseph and kept him from his rest. Didst never hear, Joseph, that it is a clever chicken that crows in the egg? the old woman continued, and who knows but Azariah will forget to come for thee! He won't forget, Granny, Joseph uttered in so doleful a tone that Rachel repented and promised Joseph she would wake him in time; and as she had never failed to keep her promise to him he allowed sleep to close his eyelids. And once asleep he was hard to awaken. At six in the morning sleep seemed to him better than Arimathea, but once awake Rachel could not hand him his clothes fast enough; he escaped from her hands, dressing himself as he ran into the lanes, and while tying his sandals at the gate he forgot them and stood at gaze, wondering whether Azariah would come to fetch him on a horse or an ass or a mule or a camel.

At last the sound of hooves came through the dusk, and a moment after some three or four camels led the way; and there were horses too and asses and mules, and the mules were caparisoned gaily, the one reserved for Joseph's riding more richly than the others—a tall fine animal by which he was proud to stand, asking questions of the muleteer, while admiring the dark docile eyes shaded with black lashes. Now why do we delay? he asked Azariah, who reminded him—and somewhat tritely—that he had not yet said good-bye to his parents. But they know I'm going with you, Sir, he answered. Azariah would not, however, allow Joseph to mount his mule till he had bidden good-bye to his father and grandmother, and he brought the boy back to the house, but without earning Dan's approval, who was ashamed before Azariah of his son's eagerness to leave home; a subtlety that escaped Rachel who chided Dan saying: try to remember if it wasn't the same with thee, for I can remember thine eyes sparkling at the sight of a horse and thy knees all of an itch to be on to him. Well, said Dan, he'll have enough riding before the day is over, and I reckon his little backside will be sore before they halt at the gates of Arimathea; a remark that caused Rachel to turn amazed eyes on her son and to answer harshly that since he had so much foresight she hoped he had not forgotten to tell Azariah that Joseph must have a long rest at midday. But thy face tells me no order has been given for the care of the child on the journey. But Azariah cannot be far on his way. I'll send a messenger to caution him that Joseph has his rest in the shade.

Dan let her go in search of the messenger and moved around the room hoping (he knew not why) that the messenger would not overtake the caravan, the which he very nearly missed doing, for while Rachel was instructing the messenger, Joseph was asking Azariah if he might have a stick to belabour his mule into a gallop. The cavalcade, he said, needed a scout that would report any traces of robbers he might detect among the rocks and bushes. But we aren't likely to meet robber bands this side of Jordan, Azariah said, they keep to the other side; and he told Joseph, who was curious about everything, that along the Jordan were great marshes into which the nomads drove their flocks and herds in the spring to feed on the young grass. So they are there now, Joseph replied meditatively, for he was thinking he would like better to ride through marshes full of reeds than through a hilly country where there was nothing to see but the barley-fields beset by an occasional olive garth. But hooves were heard galloping in the rear and when the messenger overtook the caravan and blurted out Rachel's instructions, Joseph's face flushed. Now what can a woman know, he cried, about a journey like this? Tell her, he said, turning to the messenger, that I shall ride and rest with the others. And as an earnest of his resolve he struck the messenger's horse so sharply across the quarters that the animal's head went down between his knees and he plunged so violently that the messenger was cast sprawling upon the ground. The cavalcade roared with laughter and Joseph, overjoyed at the success of his prank, begged Azariah to wait a little longer, for he was curious to see if the messenger would succeed in coaxing his horse. At present the horse seemed in no humour to allow himself to be mounted. Whenever the messenger approached he whinnied so menacingly that everybody laughed again. Is there none amongst ye that will help me to catch the horse? the poor messenger cried after the departing travellers. We have a long day's march in front of us, Azariah said; and he warned Joseph not to beat his mule into a gallop at the beginning of the journey or he would repent it later, words that came true sooner than Joseph had expected, for before midday he was asking how many miles would bring them to the caravansary. In about another hour, Azariah answered, and Joseph said he had begun to hate his mule for it would neither trot nor gallop, only walk. Thou'rt thinking of the nomads and would like to be after them flourishing a lance, Azariah said, and—afraid that he was being laughed at—Joseph made no answer.

After the rest at midday it seemed to him to be his duty to see that his mule had been properly fed, and he bought some barley from the camel-driver, but while he was giving it to his mule Azariah remarked that he was only depriving other animals of their fair share of provender. It is hard, he said, to do good without doing wrong to another. But the present is no time for philosophy: we must start again. And the cavalcade moved on through the hills, avoiding the steep ascents and descents by circuitous paths, and Joseph, who had not seen a shepherd leading his flock for some years, became all of a sudden delighted by the spectacle, the sheep running forward scenting the fresh herbage with which the hills were covered as with dark velvet.

A little later they came into view of a flock of goats browsing near a wood, and Azariah sought to improve the occasion by a little dissertation on the destructive nature of the goat. Of late years a sapling rarely escaped them, and still more regrettable was the carelessness of the shepherd who left the branches they had torn down to become dry like tinder. He spoke of many forest fires, and told all the stories he could remember in the hope of distracting Joseph's thoughts from the length of the journey. We are now about half-way, he said, disguising the truth. We shall see the city upon the evening glow in about another hour. The longest hour that I have ever known, Joseph complained two hours later; and Azariah laid his cloak over Joseph's saddle. Dost feel more comfortable? A little, the child answered. At the sight of the city thy heart will be lifted again and the suffering forgotten. And Joseph believed him, but towards the end of the day the miles seemed to stretch out indefinitely and at five o'clock he was crying: shall we ever get to Arimathea, for I can sit on this mule no longer, nor shall I be able to stand straight upon my legs when I alight.

Azariah promised they would be at the gates in a few minutes, but these few minutes seemed as if they would never pass away, but they did pass, and at the gateway Joseph toppled from his mule and just managed to hobble into the inn at which they were to sleep that night: too tired to eat, he said, too tired, he feared, to sleep. Azariah pressed him to swallow a cup of soup and he prepared a hot bath for him into which he poured a bottle of vinegar; an excellent remedy he reported this to be against stiffness, and it showed itself to be such: for next morning Joseph was quite free from stiffness and said he could walk for miles. Samuel's rock cannot be more than a few hundred yards distant, so miles are not necessary, Azariah answered, as they stepped over the threshold into a delightful morning all smiles and greetings and subtle invitations to come away into the forest and fields, full of promises of flowers and songs, but in conflict with their project, which was to inquire out their way from the maidens at the fountain, who would be sure to know it, and in its shade to read the story of David and Goliath first and other stories afterwards. But the gay morning drew their thoughts away from texts, and without being aware of their apostasy they had already begun to indulge in hopes that the maidens would be late at the fountain and leave them some time to loiter by the old aqueduct that brought the water in a tiny stream to fall into a marble trough: an erstwhile sarcophagus, maybe, Azariah said, as he gathered some water out of it with his hands and drank, telling Joseph to do likewise.

There were clouds in the sky, so the sun kept coming and going. A great lantern, Joseph said. That God holds in his hands, Azariah answered; and when tired of waiting for maidens who did not appear their beguilement was continued by shadows advancing and retreating across the roadway. The town was an enchantment in the still limpid morning, but when they rose to their feet their eyes fell on a greater enchantment—the hills clothed in moving light and shade so beautiful that the appeal to come away to the woods and fields continued in their hearts after they had lowered their eyes and would not be denied, though they prayed for strength to adhere to their original project. It had died out of their hearts through no fault of theirs, as far as they could see; and wondering how they might get remission from it they strode about the city, idly casting their eyes into ravines whither the walls dropped, and raising them to the crags whither the walls rose: faithful servants, Azariah said, that have saved the city many times from robbers from the other side of Jordan.

Joseph's thoughts were far away on the hillside opposite amid the woods, and Azariah's voice jarred. By this time, he said, the maidens are drawing water. But perhaps, Joseph answered, none will be able to tell us the way to the rock, and if none has heard for certain on which rock Samuel offered sacrifice we might go roaming over the hills and into forests yonder to find perhaps some wolf cubs in a cave. But a she-wolf with cubs is dangerous, Azariah replied. If we were to try to steal her cubs, Joseph interjected. But we don't want to meddle with them, only to see them. May we go roaming to-day, Sir, and read the story of David and Goliath to-morrow? The boy's voice was full of entreaty and Azariah had very little heart to disappoint him, but he dared not break an engagement which he looked upon as almost sacred; and walked debating with himself, asking himself if the absence of a maiden at the fountain might be taken as a sign that they were free to abandon the Scriptures for the day, only for the day. And seeing the fountain deserted Joseph cried out in his heart: we are free! But as they turned aside to go their way a maiden came with a pitcher upon her head; but as she had never heard of the rock, nor indeed of Samuel, Joseph was certain that God had specially designed her ignorant, so that they might know that the day before them was for enjoyment. You said, Sir, that if none could direct us we might leave the story until to-morrow. I did not say that, Azariah answered. All the same he did not propose to wait for another maiden more learned than the first, but followed Joseph to the gates of the city, nor did he raise any objection to passing through them, and they stood with their eyes fixed on the path that led over the brow down into the valley, a crooked twisting path that had seemed steep to Azariah's mule overnight and that now seemed steeper to Azariah. And will seem still steeper to me in the evening when we return home tired, he said. But we shall not be tired, Joseph interposed, we need not go very far, only a little way into the forest. And he did not dare to say more, lest by some careless word he might provoke an unpremeditated opposition.

He dreaded to hear the words on Azariah's lips: you have come here with me to learn Hebrew and may not miss a lesson.... If he could persuade Azariah into the path he would not turn back until they reached the valley, and once in the valley, he might as well ascend the opposite hill as go back and climb up the hill whence they had come. I am afraid, said Azariah, that this cool morning will pass into a very hot day: the clouds that veil the sky are dispersing. We shall not feel the heat once we are in the forest, Joseph replied, and the path up yonder hill is not so steep as the paths we go down by. You see the road, Sir, twisting up the hillside, and it is planned so carefully to avoid a direct ascent that a man has just belaboured his ass into a trot. They have passed behind a rock, but we shall see them presently.

Azariah waited a moment for the man and ass to reappear, but after all he was not much concerned with them, and began to descend unmindful of the lark which mounted the sky in circles singing his delirious song. Joseph begged Azariah to hearken, but his preceptor was too much occupied with the difficulties of the descent, nor could he be persuaded to give much attention to a flight of doves flying hither and thither as if they had just discovered that they could fly, diving and wheeling and then going away in a great company, coming back and diving again, setting Joseph wondering why one bird should separate himself from the flock and alight again. Again and again this happened, the flock returning to release him from his post. Were the birds playing a sort of game? Frolicking they were, for sure, and Joseph felt he would like to have wings and go away with them, and he wished Azariah would hasten, so pleasant it was in the valley.

A pleasant spacious valley it was, lying between two hills of about equal height: the hill they had come down was a little steeper than the hill they were about to go up. Joseph noticed the shadows that fell from the cliffs and those that the tall feathery trees, growing out of the scrub, cast over the sunny bottom of the valley, a water-course probably in the rainy season; and he enjoyed the little puffing winds that came and went, and the insects that came out of their hiding-places to enjoy the morning. The dragonflies were bustling about their business: what it was not easy to discover, but they went by in companies of small flies, with now and then a great one that rustled past on gauzy wings. And the bees were coming and going from their hive in the rocks, incited by the fragrance of the flowers, and Joseph watched them crawling over the anemones and leaving them hastily to bury their blunt noses in the pistils of the white squills that abounded everywhere in the corners, in the inlets and bays and crevices of the rocks. Butterflies, especially the white, pursued love untiringly in the air, fluttering and hovering, uniting and then separating—aerial wooings that Joseph followed with strained eyes, till at last the white bloom passed out of sight; and he turned to the dragonflies, hoping to capture one of the fearful kind, often nearly succeeding, but failing at the last moment and returning disappointed to Azariah who, seated on a comfortable stone, waited till Joseph's ardour should abate a little. These stones will be too hot in another hour, he said. But it will be cool enough under the boughs, Joseph answered. Perhaps too cool, Azariah muttered, and Joseph wondered if it were reasonable to be so discontented with the world, especially on a morning like this, he said to himself; and to hearten Azariah he mentioned again that the path up the hillside zigzagged. You'll not feel the ascent, Sir. To which encouragement Azariah made no answer but drew Joseph's attention to the industry of the people of Arimathea. The eager boy could spare only a few moments for the beauty of the fig and mulberry leaves showing against the dark rocks, but he snuffed the scent the breeze bore and said it was the same that had followed them yesterday. The scent of the vine-flower, Azariah rejoined. The hillsides were covered with the pale yellow clusters. But I thought, Joseph, that you were too tired yesterday to notice anything. Only towards the end of the journey, Joseph muttered. But what are you going to do, Sir? he asked. I am going to run up the hill. You may run if you please, the preceptor answered, and as he followed the boy at a more leisurely pace he wondered at Joseph's spindle shanks struggling manfully against the ascent. He will stop before the road turns, he said, but Joseph ran on. He is anxious to reach the top, Azariah pondered. There is some pleasant turf up there full of flowers: he'll like to roll like a young donkey, his heels in the air, Azariah said to himself as he ascended the steep path, stopping from time to time that he might better ponder on the moral of this spring morning. He will roll among the grass and flowers like a young donkey, and then run hither and thither after insects and birds, his heart aflame with delight. He desires so many things that he knows not what he desires, only that he desires. Whereas I can but remember that once I was as he is to-day. So the spring is sad for the young as well as for the old.

But old as he was he was glad to feel that he was still liable to the season's thrill in retrospect at least, and he asked himself questions: how many years ago is it since...? But he did not get further with his recollections. The ascent is too steep, he said, and he continued the ascent thinking of his breath rather than of her.

Joseph stood waiting on the edge of the rocks and cried out in the fulness of his joy on seeing his preceptor appear above the cliff, and at once fell to rolling himself over and over. Just as I expected he would, Azariah remarked to himself. And then, starting to his feet, Joseph began gathering flowers, but in a little while he stood still, his nosegay dropping flower by flower, for his thoughts had taken flight. The doves, the doves! he cried, looking into the blue and white sky. The doves have their nests in the woods, the larks build in the grass he said, and asked Azariah to come with him. The nest was on a tuft of grass. But I've not touched them, he said. Three years ago I used to rob all the nests and blow the eggs, you see, for I was making a collection. Azariah asked him if the lark would grieve for her eggs, and Joseph answered that he supposed she would soon forget them. Hark to his singing! and he ran on into the outskirts of the woods, coming back a few minutes afterwards to ask Azariah to hasten, for the wood was more beautiful than any wood he had ever seen. And if you know the trees in which the doves build I will climb and get the nest. Doves build in taller trees than these, in fir-trees, Azariah answered. But this is a pretty wood, Joseph. And he looked round the quiet sunny oak wood and began his relation that this wood was probably the remains of the ancient forests that had covered the country when the Israelites came out of the north of Arabia. How long ago was that, Sir? Joseph asked, and Azariah hazarded the answer that it might be as many as fifteen hundred years ago. How old is the oldest oak-tree? Joseph inquired, and Azariah had again to hazard the answer that a thousand years would make an old tree. And when will these trees be in leaf, Sir, and may we come to Arimathea when they are in leaf? And look, somebody has been felling trees here. Who do you think it was, Sir? Azariah looked round. The forest must have been supplying the city with firewood for many years, he said. All these trees are young and they are too regularly spaced for a natural growth. But higher up the hills the woods are denser and darker, and there we may find some old trees. Any badgers and foxes? Joseph asked, and shall we see any wolves?

The sunny woods were threaded with little paths, and Joseph cast curious eyes upon them all. The first led him into bracken so deep that he did not venture farther, and the second took him to the verge of a dark hollow so dismal that he came running back to ask if there were crocodiles in the waters he had discovered. He did not give his preceptor time to answer the difficult question, but laid his hand upon his arm and whispered that he was to look between two rocks, for a jackal was there, slinking away—turning his pointed muzzle to us now and then. To see he isn't followed, Azariah added: and the observation endeared him so to Joseph that the boy walked for a moment pensively in the path they were following. It turned into the forest, and they had not gone very far before they became aware of a strange silence, if silence it could be called, for when they listened the silence was full of sound, innumerable little sounds, some of which they recognised; but it was not the hum of the insects or the chirp of a bird or the snapping of a rotten twig that filled Joseph with awe, but something that he could neither see, nor hear, nor smell, nor touch. The life of the trees—is that it? he asked himself. A remote and mysterious life was certainly breathing about him, and he regretted he was without a sense to apprehend this life.

Again and again it seemed that the forest was about to whisper its secret, but something always happened to interrupt. Once it was certainly Azariah's fault, for just as the trees were about to speak he picked up a leaf and began to explain how the shape of an oak leaf differed from that of the leaf of the chestnut and the ash. A patter was heard among the leaves. There she goes—a hare! Joseph said, and a moment afterwards a white thing appeared. A white weasel, Azariah said. Shall we follow him? Joseph asked, and Azariah answered that it would be useless to follow. We should soon miss them in the thickets. And he continued his discourse upon trees, hoping that Joseph would never again mistake a sycamore for a chestnut. And what is that tree so dark and gloomy rising up through all the other trees, Joseph asked, so much higher than any of them? That is a cedar, Azariah said. Do doves build in cedars? Azariah did not know, and the tree did not inspire a climb: it seemed to forbid any attempt on its privacy. Do trees talk when they are alone? Joseph asked Azariah, and his preceptor gave the very sensible answer that the life of trees is unknown to us, but that trees had always awakened religious emotions in men. The earliest tribes were tree-worshippers, which was very foolish, for we can fell trees and put them to our usage.

They had come to a part of the forest in which there seemed to be neither birds nor beasts and Joseph had begun to feel the forest a little wearisome and to wish for a change, when the trees suddenly stopped, and before them lay a sunny interspace full of tall grass with here and there a fallen tree, and on these trees prone great lizards sunned themselves, nodding their heads in a motion ever the same. Something had died in that beautiful interspace, for a vulture rose sullenly and went away over the top of the trees, and Azariah begged Joseph not to pursue his search but to hasten out of the smell of the carrion that a little breeze had just carried towards them. Besides, this thick grass is full of snakes, he said, and the words were no sooner out of his mouth than a snake issued from a thick tuft, stopped and hissed. Snakes feed on mice and rats? Joseph asked, and come out of their holes to catch them, isn't that so, Sir? Everything is out this sunny morning, seeking its food, Azariah answered: snakes after mice, vultures after carrion. This way, Joseph—yonder we may rest awhile, but we must be careful not to sit upon a snake; that knoll yonder is free from vermin, for the trees that grow about it are fir-trees and snakes do not like any place where they can easily be detected. And they sat on the fibrous ground and looked up into the darkness of the withered pines—withered everywhere except in the topmost branches that alone caught the light. A sad place to sit in, Joseph said. Don't you feel the sadness, Sir? Azariah answered that he did. But it is preferable to snake-bites, he added. At that moment slowly flapping wings were heard overhead. It is the vulture returning, Azariah whispered to Joseph, and he is bringing a comrade back to dinner. To a very smelly dinner, Joseph rejoined. The breeze had veered suddenly and they found themselves again in the smell of carrion.

We must go on farther, Azariah said, and after passing into many quiet hollows and ascending many crests the path to which they had remained faithful debouched at last on broken ground with the tail end of the forest straggling up the opposite hillside in groups and single trees. I know where we are now, Joseph cried. Do you not remember, Sir—Joseph's explanation was cut short by the sight of some shepherds sitting at their midday meal, and hunger falling suddenly upon Azariah and Joseph, both began to regret they had not brought food with them. But Azariah had some shekels tied in his garment, and for one of these pieces of silver the shepherds were glad to share their bread and figs with them and to draw milk for them from one of the she-goats. From which shall I draw milk? the shepherd asked his mate, and the mate answered: White-nose looks as if her udder is paining her. She lost her kid yesterday. He mentioned two others: Speckled and Long-ears. Whichever would like her milk drawn off will answer to thy call, the shepherd answered, and the goat came running to him as if glad to hear her name. White-nose, isn't it? Joseph asked, and he gathered a branch for her, and while she nibbled he watched the milk drawn off and drank it foaming and warm from the jug, believing it to be the sweetest he had ever drunk, though he had often drunk goat's milk before. Azariah, too, vowed that he had never drunk better milk and persuaded the shepherds into discourse of their trade, learning much thereby, for these men knew everything that men may know about flocks, having been engaged in leading them from pasture to pasture all their lives and their fathers before them.

After telling of many famous rams they related the courage and fidelity of their dogs, none of which feared a wolf, and they mentioned that two had been lost in an encounter with a leopard—but the flock had been saved. As much as wolves the shepherds feared the eagles. There are a dozen nests in yon mountain if there be one. Take the strangers up the hillside, mate, so that they may get a sight of the birds. And Azariah and Joseph followed the shepherd up to the crags and were shown some birds wheeling above rocks so steep that there was no foothold for man. Or else we should have had their nests long ago, the shepherd said. Now here is a bear's trail. He's been seeking water here, but he didn't get any; he came by here, and my word, he's been up here after wild bees. The shepherd showed scratches among the dropping resin, saying: it was here that he clawed his way up. But did he get the honey? Joseph asked, a question the shepherd could not answer; and talking about bears and honey and eagles and lambs and wolves and lions, the afternoon passed away without their feeling it, till one of the shepherds said: it is folding-time now; and answering to different calls the flocks separated, and the shepherds went their different ways followed by their flocks.

The sunset had begun to redden the sky, and the shadows of the trees drew out as they crossed the hillside and descended by the steep path into the valley. The ascent that faced them was steep indeed, and Azariah had to rest several times, but at last they reached the slope on which the city was built: but they did not enter the gates yet awhile but stood looking back, thinking of the day that had gone by. We shall remember this day always, Joseph said, if we live to be as old as the patriarchs. Was it then so wonderful? Azariah asked, and Joseph could only answer: yes, very wonderful. Didn't you think so? and tell me, he added, is it true that God is going to destroy the world and very soon? Why do you ask, Joseph? Azariah replied, and Joseph answered: because the world is so very beautiful. I never saw the world before to-day. My eyes were opened, and I shall be sorry if God destroys the world, for I should like to see more of it. But why should he make a beautiful world, and then destroy it? Don't you think he will relent when the time comes and the day be as beautiful as it was this morning? Azariah answered him that God does not relent, for He knows the past and future as well as the present, and that the world was not as beautiful as it seems to be, for man is sinning always, though certainly God said all things are beautiful. But perhaps we sinned this morning in the sight of God. We sinned? Joseph repeated. How did we sin? Have you forgotten, Azariah answered, that it was arranged that we should spend the day reading the Scriptures, and we've spent it talking to shepherds? Was that a sin? Joseph asked. We can read the Scriptures to-morrow; if the day be clouded and rain comes, we can read them indoors. If the day be clouded, Azariah replied smiling. But was not thy life dedicated to Samuel? Thou hast forgotten him. But the world is God's world. Joseph answered that he had forgotten his vow, and all that evening, in spite of Azariah's gentleness with him, he was pursued by the memory of the sin he had committed. In Samuel's own city he had broken his vow! And Azariah heard the boy blubbering in the darkness that night.

CHAP. III.

He should not have interrupted the manifestations of joy at his return with: when may I go to Arimathea again? And his second question was hardly less indiscreet: why did we leave Arimathea? His father answered: because it suited us to do so; and Joseph withdrew to Rachel who was never gruff with him. But despite her bias in favour of all he said and did she reproved him, saying that he should not ask as soon as he returned home when he was going away again. I am glad in a way, Granny, but there's no forest here. Dan left the room, and the boy would tell no more but burst into tears, asking what he had done to make Father so angry. Rachel could not tell him with safety, and Joseph, thinking that perhaps something unpleasant had happened to his father in the forest (a wolf may have bitten him there), spoke of the high rock on the next occasion and of the story of Jonathan and David that Azariah had read to him. You will ask him to come here one night, Father, and translate it to you? Promise me that you will. But I can read Hebrew, Dan replied, and there is no reason for those wondering eyes. Thy Granny will tell thee. But, Father—Joseph stopped suddenly. It had come into his mind to ask his father how it was that he had never read the story of Jonathan and David to him, but his interest in the matter dying suddenly, he said: to-morrow I begin my lessons, and Azariah tells me that I must have a copy of the Scriptures for my very own use. Now where are thy thoughts? In a barrel of salt fish? Father, do listen. I'd like to learn Hebrew from bottom to top and from top to bottom and then sideways, so as to put the Scribes in Jerusalem to shame when you send me thither for the Feast of the Passover. And thou'lt mind that my Scriptures be made by the best Scribe in Galilee and on the best parchment, promise me, Father!

Dan promised his son that no finer manuscript should be procurable in Galilee. But the making of this magnificent copy would delay for many months Joseph's instruction in Hebrew, and Joseph was so impatient to begin that he lay awake that night and in the morning ransacked his father's rooms, laying hands on some quires of his father's Scriptures; and no sooner out of the house than a great fear fell upon him that he might be robbed: the quires were hidden in his vest suddenly and he walked on in confidence, also in a great seriousness, going his way melancholy as a camel, his head turned from the many temptations that the way offered to him—the flower in the cactus hedge was one. He passed it without picking it, and further on he allowed a strange crawling insect to go by without molestation, and feeling his mood to be exceptional he fell to thinking that his granny would laugh, were she to see him.

He was not, however, afraid of her laughing: women had no sense of the Word of God, he muttered. There were nests in the trees, but he kept himself from looking, lest a nest might inspire him to climb for it. But nobody could climb trees with several quires of Scriptures under his arm. He would lose his grip and fall, or else the Scriptures would fall, and if a thief happened to be going by it would be easy for him to pick up the quires and away with them before it would be possible for Joseph to slide down the tree and raise a hue and cry.

The lanes through which his way took him were frequented by boys, ball-players every one of them, and at this time ball-playing was a passion with Joseph and he would steal away whenever he got a chance and spend a whole day in an alley with a number of little ragamuffins. And if he were to meet the tribe, which was as likely as not at the next turning, he must tell them that he was going to school and dared not stop. But they would jeer at him. He might give them his ball and in return they might not mock at him. He walked very quietly, hoping to pass unobserved, but a boy was looking over the cactus hedge and called to him, asking if he had brought a ball with him, for they had lost theirs. He threw his ball to him. But aren't you coming to play with us? Not to-day, Joseph answered. I'm on my way to school. Well, to-morrow? Not to-morrow. I may not play truant from learning, Joseph answered sententiously, walking away, leaving his former playmates staring after him without a word in their mouths. But by the next day they had recovered their speech and cried out: the fishmonger's son is going by to his lessons and dare not play at ball. Azariah would whip him if he did. One a little bolder than the rest dangled a piece of rope in his face saying: this is what you'd get if you stayed with us. He was moved to run after the boy and cuff him, but the quires under his arms restrained him and he passed on, keeping a dignified silence. Soon thou'lt be reading to us in the synagogues! was the last jeer cried after him that day, but for many a day he caught sight of a face grinning at him through the hedge, and the way to his lessons became hateful.

As he showed no sign of anger, the persecution grew wearisome to the persecutors, and soon after he discovered another way to Azariah. But this way was beset with women, whose sex impelled a yearning for this tall lithe boy with the gazelle-like eyes. Joseph was more inclined to the welcome of the Greek poets and sculptors who stopped their mules and leaning from high saddles spoke to him, for he was now beginning to speak Greek and it was pleasant to avail himself of the advantages of the road to chatter his Greek and to acquire new turns of phrases. Why not? since it seemed to be the wish of these men to instruct him. My very model! a bearded man cried out one morning, and stopping his mule he bent from the saddle towards Joseph and asked him many questions. Joseph told him that he was on his way to his lessons and that he passed through this lane every morning. At these words the sculptor's eyes lighted up, for he had accepted Joseph's answer as a tryst, and when Joseph came through the lane next day he caught sight of the sculptor waiting for him and—flattered—Joseph entered into conversation with him, resisting, however, the sculptor's repeated invitation that Joseph should come to sit to him—if not for a statue, for a bust at least. But a bust is a graven image, Joseph answered, and as the point was being debated a rich merchant came by, riding a white horse that curveted splendidly, and Joseph, who was interested in the horse, referred the difficulty they were engaged in to the merchant. After some consideration of it he asked the meaning of the scrolls that Joseph carried in his hand, feigning an interest in them and in Azariah. Who is he? he asked, and Joseph answered: a very learned man, my tutor, to whom I must be on my way. And with a pretty bow he left merchant and sculptor exchanging angry looks.

But the sculptor knowing more of Joseph than the merchant—that he would be passing through the lane on the morrow at the same time—and as the boy's beauty was of great importance to him, kept another tryst, waiting impatiently, and as soon as Joseph appeared he began to beseech him to come to Tiberias and pose in his studio for a statue he was carving, offering presents that would have shaken many determinations. But Joseph was as firm to-day as he was yesterday. I must be going on to my Hebrew, he said, and he left the sculptor cast away in dreams. He had not gone very far, however, before he met the merchant, who happened to be passing through the lane again, and seeing Joseph his eyes lighted up with pleasure, and after speaking to him he dismounted from his mule and showed him a beautiful engraved dagger which Joseph desired ardently; but a present so rich he did not care to accept, and hurried away, nor did he look back, so busy was he inventing reasons as he went for the delay.

I do not deny, Sir, that I'm past my time, but not by an hour; at most by half an hour. Playing at ball again, and in the purlieus of the neighbourhood, against your father's instructions! Azariah said, his face full of storm. No, Sir, I have put ball-playing out of my mind; or Hebrew has put it out of my mind, and Greek too has had a say in the matter. The delay was caused by meeting a sculptor who asked me to pose before him for a statue. And what was thy answer to him? That we were forbidden by our laws to look upon graven images. And what answer did he give to that very proper answer? Azariah asked, somewhat softened. Many answers, Sir, and among them was this one: that there was no need for me to look upon the statue he was carving. The answer that one might expect from a Greek, Azariah rapped out, one that sets me thinking that there is more to be said against the Greek language than I cared to admit to thy father when last in argument with him on the subject. But, Sir, you will not forbid me the reading of Menander for no better reason than that a Greek asked that he might carve a statue after me, for what am I to blame, since yourself said my answer was commendable? And in these words there was so plaintive an accent that Azariah's heart was touched, for he guessed that the diverting scene in which the slave arranges for a meeting between the lovers was in the boy's mind.

At that moment their eyes went together to the tally on the wall, and pointing to it Joseph said it bore witness to the earnestness with which he had pursued his studies for the last six months, and Azariah was forced to admit there was little to complain of in the past, but he had noticed that once a boy came late for his lessons his truancy became common. Moreover, Sir, my time is of importance, Azariah declared, his hairy nostrils swelling at the thought of the half hour he had been kept waiting. But may we finish Menander's comedy? Joseph asked, for he was curious to learn if Moschion succeeded in obtaining his father's leave to marry the girl he had put in the family way. The lovers' plan was to ingratiate themselves with the father's concubine and to persuade her to get permission to rear and adopt the child. Yes, Joseph, the father relents. But it would please me, Sir, to learn why he relents. And Joseph promised that he would be for a whole year in advance of his time rather than behind it. He did not doubt that he would be able to keep his promise, for he had found a new way to Tiberias; a deserted way it seemed to be at first, and most propitious, without the temptations of ball-players, but as the season advanced the lane became infested by showmen on their way to Tiberias: mummers, acrobats, jugglers, fortune-tellers, star-mongers, dealers in charms and amulets, and Joseph was tempted more than once to stop and speak with these random folk, but the promise he had given Azariah was sufficiently powerful to inspire a dread and a dislike of these, and to avoid them he sought for a third way to Tiberias and found one: a path through an orchard belonging to a neighbour who was glad to give him permission to pass through it every morning, which he did, thereby making progress in his studies till one day, by the stile over which his custom was to vault into the quiet lane, he came suddenly upon what seemed to him like a small encampment: wayfarers of some sort he judged them to be, but of what sort he could not tell at first, there being some distance and the branches of an apple-tree between him and them.

But as he came through the trees, he decided in his mind that they were the servitude of some great man: varlets, hirelings or slaves. But his eyes fell on their baskets and—deceived by the number and size of these—the thought crossed his mind that they might be poulterers on their way to Tiberias. But whatever their trade they had no right to encamp in the orchard, and he informed them politely that the orchard belonged to friends of his, and that large and fierce dogs were loose about the place. For his warning they thanked him, saying they'd make off at once; remarking as they made their preparations for going that they did not think they were doing any harm by coming into the orchard, having only crossed the stile to rest themselves.

Going with poultry to Tiberias? Joseph said. Not with poultry, Sir, the varlets answered. We are not poulterers, but cockers. Cockers! Joseph repeated, and on reading the blank look in his face they told him they were the servants of a great Roman who had sent them in search of fighting cocks; for a great main was going to be fought that day in Tiberias. We are his cockers, a man said (he spoke with some slight authority, the others seemed to be in his charge), and have been far in search of these birds. He pointed to the baskets and asked Joseph if he would care to see the cocks, and as if to awaken Joseph's curiosity he began to tell their pedigrees. That one, he said, is a Cilician and of a breed that has won thousands of shekels, and a bird in the basket next him is a Bythinian brown-red, the victor in many a main, and the birds in the next three baskets are Cappadocian Duns, all of celebrated ancestry, for our master will have none but the finest birds; and if you happen to know of any good birds, price will not stand in the way of our purchasing them. Joseph answered that he had not heard of any, but if he should—You'll not forget us, said a small meagre woman with black shining eyes in a colourless face, drab as the long desert road she had come by. Joseph promised; and then a short thick-set man with matted hair, and sore eyes that were always fixed on the ground, opened one of the baskets and took out a long lean bird, which he held in shining fingers for Joseph's admiration. Listen to him, cried the woman in a high thin voice. Listen to him, for no one can set a cock a-sparring like him. The servants consulted among themselves in a language Joseph did not understand, and then, as if they had come to an agreement among themselves, the foreman said, approaching Joseph and cringing a little before him, that if the little master could assure them they would not be disturbed by dogs, they would like to show him the cocks. A little exercise, the man said, would be of advantage to the birds—to those that were not fighting that morning—he added, and the man whom the woman nicknamed The Heeler, a nickname acquired from the dexterity with which he fitted the cock's heels with soft leather pads, said: you see, master, they may fight and buffet one another for a space without injury.

Joseph watched the birds advance and retire and pursue each other, and after this exhibition they were put back into their baskets and covered with hay. So you are the Heeler? Joseph asked. The man grinned vacantly, and the woman answered for him. There is none like him in this country for fixing a pair of spurs, for cutting the tail and wings and shortening the hackle and the rump feathers. You see, young Master, the comb is cut close so that there shall be no mark for t'other bird's bill. And who knows but you'd like to see the spurs, Master. And she showed him spurs of two kinds, for there are cocks that fight better with long spurs and cocks that fight better with short. And how many days does it take to train a cock? Joseph asked, and they began to tell him that a fighting cock must be fed with bread and spring water, and have his exercise—running and sparring—every day. It was the woman that kept Joseph in chat, for the men were busy carrying the baskets over the stile and placing them in mule cars that were waiting in the lane. But, young Master, she said, if you've never seen a cock-fight come with us, for a better one you'll never live to see. The best birds in Western Asia will be in Tiberias to-day. Joseph did not answer this invitation at once, for he did not altogether like this woman nor her manner of standing near to him, her black shining eyes fixed upon him. But he was like one infected, and could not escape from his desire to see a cock-fight. He knew that Azariah would never forgive him for keeping him waiting ... waiting for how long? he asked himself. Till he cares to wait no longer, his conscience answered him. He was going to get into great trouble, but he could not say no to the cockers, and he followed them, asking himself when he should escape from the evil spirit which—at their instigation, perhaps—had taken possession of him. A moment after he was assuring himself that the folk he had fallen in with were ignorant of everything but cockering, without knowledge of witchcraft, star-mongering or sortilege—the servants of some great Roman, without doubt, which was sufficient assurance that though they might be cock stealers on occasion they were not kidnappers. Besides, in frequented lanes and in Tiberias the stealing of a boy was out of the question, and after seeing one or two cocks killed he could return home, for he need not wait till the end. He could not help himself, he must see the great red and yellow bird strike his spur through the head of his adversary, as the Heeler told him he had never failed to do in many combats. And he would not fail now, though he was two years old, which is old for a fighting cock. You see, little Master, the woman said, they be not as quick on their legs as they get older, nor are they as eager to fight. To-day's battle will be his last—win or lose—and if he conies out alive at the end he'll go to the hens, which will be more frolicsome than having spurs driven into his neck as happened three months gone by, but it didn't check his spirit, she continued, he killed his bird and let off one great crowing before he toppled over: we thought he was gone, but I sucked his wound, bathed it with salt and water, and you see he's none the worse to-day.

At every turning of the lane the demon seemed to propel Joseph more violently, till at last he put Azariah out of his head and began to ask himself if he would be guilty of any great sin in going to see the cock-fight? Of any sin greater than that of following the custom of the heathen? His father might be angry, but there'd be no particular atonement: a fast day, or some study of the law, no more, for he'd be careful not to raise his eyes to the gods and goddesses that beset the streets and public places in Tiberias. And on this resolve he followed the cockers into the city. He was glad to see that many statues stood on the roofs of the buildings and so far away that no faces or limbs were visible; but the statues in the streets were difficult to avoid seeing. Worst of all, the cock-fight that he thought would be fought in the open air had been arranged to happen in a great building—a theatre or circus—he did not know which. Joseph had never seen so great a crowd before, and the servants he had come with pointed out to him their master among a group of Romans. The Jews from Alexandria, he was told, came to these games, and this caused his conscience to quicken, for he had heard his father speak of the Alexandrian Jews as heretics. Azariah did not hold such orthodox views, but what his tutor's views were about cock-fighting Joseph did not know; and when he asked if he might approach the ring he was told that the circle about the ring was for the Romans and those whom they might invite, but he'd be able to see very well from where he was.

The Romans seemed to him an arrogant and proud people; and, conscious of an innate hostility, he watched them as they leaned over the railing that enclosed the fighting ring, talking among themselves, sometimes, however, deigning to call a Jew to join them. The Jews came to them obsequiously, hoping that the honour bestowed upon them did not escape notice; and Joseph's ear caught servile phrases: young Sir, it is reported you've a bird that will smite down all comers, and, Sir, we can offer you but a poor show of birds. Those at Rome——

A sudden silence fell, which was broken by the falling of dice, and Joseph was told that the throw would decide which seven birds were to begin.... We have won the throw, was whispered in his ear. We've the advantage. But why it was an advantage to fight from the right rather than from the left Joseph was too excited to inquire, for the cocks had just been put into the ring or pit, and Joseph recognised the tall lank bird that the Heeler had taken out of his basket in the orchard. He's fighting to-day with long spurs, he was told. But why does he fight the other bird—a yearling? he heard the woman ask; and he saw a black cock crouch to meet the red in deadly fight. Must one die? he asked, but the cockers were too intent on the battle to answer his question. The birds re-sparred and leaped aside, avoiding each other's rushes, and before long it became clear even to Joseph that their bird, though stronger than the younger bird, did not spring as high or as easily. A good bird, he heard the servants say: there'll be a battle for it, my word, there will, and our bird will win if the young one doesn't get his stroke in quickly; an old bird will tire out a young bird.... As these words were spoken, the black cock dashed in, and with a quick stroke sent his spur through the red bird's head. He's gone this time beyond thy care! And tears came into Lydia's eyes. I'm sorry, I'd have liked to have seen him end his days happily among the hens, a-treading of them. Joseph felt he had not rightly understood her, and when he inquired out her meaning from her, she told it with so repulsive a leer that he could not conquer a sudden dislike. He moved away from her immediately and asked her no more questions.

More cocks were set to fight, and they fought to the death always: only once did a cock turn tail and refuse to continue the combat. To persuade him to be brave, the slave in charge placed him breast to breast with his adversary, but despite all encouragement he turned tail and hid himself in the netting. Now what will happen to him? Joseph asked. First he'll be cut and then fattened for the spit or the gridiron, the Heeler answered. Look, young Master, and turning his eyes whither the Heeler's finger pointed, Joseph saw the bird's owner sign to the slave that he was to twist the bird's neck; which was done, and the poltroon went into a basket by himself—he did not deserve to be with those that had been slain in combat.

The ring was now covered with blood and feathers, and two slaves came with buckets of water and brushes to clean it, and while this office was being performed many fell to drinking from flasks which their slaves handed to them. The man who had told his slave to wring his cock's neck regretted that he had done so. The merited punishment would have been to hand the bird over to a large ape, that would have plucked the bird feather by feather, examining each feather curiously before selecting the next one; and he swore a great oath by Jupiter and then, as if to annoy the Jews, by Jehovah, that the next of his birds that refused combat should be served this way. Our master will not put us on the cross for so misjudging a bird's courage, Joseph heard the Heeler say; and Lydia sidled up against Joseph, and it was her thigh as much as the memory of the oaths he had heard uttered and that were being uttered and that would be uttered again as soon as the fighting commenced that set him thinking of Azariah scanning the tally on the wall—vowing that he would teach him no more; but the tally, which Joseph knew well, showed that he had not missed an hour for many months. But a whole day's absence was something more than any truancy he had ever indulged in before, and the only reason he could give for it would be the inacceptable one that the cockers had bidden a demon take possession of him.

Another pair of cocks was already in the ring: two young birds trained to the finest distinction, and they sparred so lustily that even the experts could not predict the victor. But there was no heart in Joseph for more cock-fighting, and he viewed with disgust the mean vile faces that leered at him while he thanked them for the occasion which he owed them of overlooking so much fine sport. But they were a scurvy lot, viler than he had supposed, though he had suspected from the first that they were nurturing some trick against him. And he searched himself, for he would willingly give them money to be rid of them. But how much will they accept? he asked himself, as he searched his pockets ... his money was gone! Stolen, no doubt, but by whom? By the cockers standing around him, quarrelling and railing at each other, levelling accusations right and left—the Heeler wrangling with Lydia, saying it was she that had asked the young penniless to come with them. A mercy it was that he didn't call me a ragamuffin, Joseph said to himself. He was not without some apprehension that they might detain him till a ransom was paid, and right glad to perceive himself free to go: having gotten his money they wished to be rid of him quietly; and he too, wishing to avoid attracting attention, slunk out of Tiberias without laying complaint before the magistrate.

It was unlikely that his money would be found upon the thieves and his father would be very angry indeed if he were obliged to go to Tiberias to bear witness to the truth of his story that his son, while on his way to his tutor's—Joseph stopped to consider the eventualities, and he heard in imagination the tale unfolding. Azariah might be called! And if he were, he would tell he had been kept waiting all day, and the jealous neighbours would be glad to send round to commiserate with his father. It seemed to Joseph that he had escaped lightly with the loss of a few shekels. But what reason should he give for coming home so late? He'd have to say where he had spent the day. Azariah would tell of his absence from his lessons. Ah, if he had foreseen all these worries, he wouldn't have gone to Tiberias.... Should he say he had been out fishing on the lake? The fishers would not betray him, but they might; and he could not bring himself to tell his father a lie. So did he argue with himself as he walked, saying that he had not done worse than—But what had happened at home? Something must have happened, for the gates were open. The gate-keeper, where was he? And his wonder increased as he reached the house, for all the servants seemed to be running to and fro. The Lord be praised for sending you back to us! they exclaimed. You thought then that the Lord had taken me from you? Joseph asked, and the man replied that they had been searching for him all day—sending messengers hither and thither, and that in the afternoon a boat had hoisted sail and put out for the fishing fleet, thinking that Simon Peter might be able to give tidings of Master Joseph. But why all this fuss? Joseph said, because I come home a little later than usual. Your father, Master Joseph, is beside himself, and your grandmother—Joseph left the man with the end of the sentence on his tongue.

So you've returned at last! his father cried on seeing him, and began at once to tell the anxiety he had suffered. Nor was Rachel without her word, and between their reproofs it was some time before Joseph began to apprehend the cause of the tumult: Azariah had laid a long complaint of truancy! As to that, Joseph answered tartly, he has little to complain of. And he spoke of the pact between them, relating that seven or eight months before he had promised Azariah not to be past his time by five minutes. Look to his tally, Father: it will tell that I have kept my word for eight months and more and would have kept it for the year if—Be mindful of what he is saying to thee, Dan. Look well to the tally before condemning, Rachel cried. Wouldst have it then, woman, Azariah lied to me? Not lied, but was carried beyond himself in a great heat of passion at being kept waiting, Rachel answered. He said that he enjoyed teaching thee, Joseph, God having granted thee a good intelligence and ways of comprehension. But he couldn't abide seeing thee waste thy time and his. We're willing and ready to hear about this absence and the cause of it, Dan interposed. So get on with the story: where hast thou been? Out with it, boy. Where hast thou been?

The bare question could only be met by the bare answer: watching a cock-fight in Tiberias; and to save his parents from much misunderstanding, he said he must begin at the beginning. Dan would have liked a straight answer, but Rachel said the boy should be suffered to tell his story his own way; and Joseph told a fine tale, the purport of which was that he had sought for a by-way to Tiberias, the large lanes being beset by acrobats, zanies, circus riders and the like, and had found one through Argob orchard and had followed it daily without meeting anyone for many months, but this morning as he came through the trees he had caught sight of an encampment; some cockers on their way to Tiberias, where a great main was to be fought. And it was the cocks of Pamphilia that had—He stopped, for the great change that had come over his parents' faces set him wondering if his conduct was as shameful as their faces seemed to affirm. He could not see that he had sinned against the law by going to Tiberias, though he had associated himself with Gentiles and for a whole day ... he had eaten in their company, but not of any forbidden meat. And while Joseph sought to mitigate his offence to himself, his father sat immersed in woe, his head in his hands. What calamity, he cried, has fallen on my house, and how have I sinned, O Lord, that punishment should fall upon me, and that my own son should be chosen to mete out my punishment? My house is riven from rafter to foundation stone. But, Father, at most—It seemed useless to plead. He stood apart; his grandmother stood silent and grave, not understanding fully, and Joseph foresaw that he could not count upon her to side with him against his father. But if his father would only tell him if he had sinned against the law, instead of rending his garments, he would do all the law commanded to obtain forgiveness. Was there, he asked, anything in the law against cock-fighting? or in the traditions? It was a pastime of the heathen: he knew that, and had hoped a day of fasting might be suggested to him, but if this offence was more serious than he had supposed he besought his father to say so. Tell me, Father, have I sinned against the law?

The question seemed to exasperate his father who at last cried out: of what value may be thy Hebrew studies and a knowledge of the language, if the law be not studied with Azariah? Does not the Book of Leviticus ever lie open before thee? How has the law been affronted? The law given by the Lord unto Moses. My own son asks me this. "And if a soul sin and hear the voice swearing and is a witness whether he has sinned or known of it, if he did not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity." Was there no swearing at thy cock-fight? Plenty, I reckon. All day was spent listening to swearing, hearing the name of the Lord taken in vain: a name we don't dare to pronounce ourselves. Joseph sat dumbfounded. So Azariah never taught thee the law? All the time goes by wasted in the reading of Greek plays. We read Hebrew and speak it, Joseph answered, and it was your wish that I should learn Greek. And, Father, is there any reason to worry over a loss of repute? For my sin will be known to nobody but God, unless told by thee, and thou'lt keep it secret. Or told by Azariah, Dan answered moodily, who never teaches the law, but likes Greek plays better. Well, thou shalt hear the law from me to-night, for I can read Hebrew, not, belike, as well as Azariah, but I can read Hebrew all the same. Mother, hand me down the Scriptures from the shelf.

CHAP. IV.

Well, Dan, you must make up your mind whether you are going to look out for one who will teach him better, or let him remain with Azariah, who likes teaching him, for he is a clever but oft-times an idle boy. I don't know that I should have said idle, she added, and sat thinking of what word would describe Joseph's truancy better than idle, without, however, finding the word she needed, and her thoughts floated away into a long consideration of her son's anger, for she could see he was angry with Azariah. But the cause of his anger she could not discover. It could not be that he was annoyed with Azariah for coming to complain that he was often kept waiting: and it was on her tongue to ask him why he was so gloomy, why he knitted his brows and bit his lips. But she held back the question, for it would not be long before Dan would let out his secret: he could not keep one. And Dan, knowing well his own weakness and his mother's shrewdness (she would soon be guessing what was passing in his mind), began to animadvert on Azariah for his residence in Tiberias, a pagan city—his plan for leading her on a false trail. Others, he said, spoke more unfavourably than he did; and he continued in this strain until Rachel, losing patience, interrupted him suddenly saying that Azariah did not live in Tiberias. If not in Tiberias, he answered, in a suburb, and within a stone's throw of the city walls. But what has that got to do with Joseph? Rachel asked. What has it got to do with Joseph! Dan growled, when to reach the scribe's house he has to pass through lanes infested with the off-scourings of the pagan world: mummers, zanies, jugglers, dancers, whores from Babylon. Did ye not hear him, woman, describe these lanes, saying that he had to change his course three times so that he might keep his promise to Azariah, and are ye not mindful that he told me, and you sitting there listening on that very stool, that the showmen he met in Argob orchard put a spell upon him, and that it was the demon that had obtained temporary lodgment in him that had bidden him to Tiberias to see the cock-fight: Jews from Alexandria, heretics, adventurers, beggars, aliens! Look ye here, Dan, Rachel said, he is a proud boy and may thank thee little for—There are others to teach him, Dan interrupted, and continued to walk up and down the room, for he wished to make an end of this talk with his mother. But he hadn't crossed the room twice when he was brought to a full stop, having remembered suddenly that it is always by such acts as he was now meditating that fathers lose the affections of their sons. If he were to drag Joseph away from Azariah, from whom he was learning Hebrew and Greek, Joseph might begin to look upon him as a tyrant. His mother was a sharp-witted woman, and very little was needed to set her thinking. She had an irritating way of looking as it were into his mind, and if she were to suspect him of jealousy of Azariah he would never have a moment's peace again.

But what in the world may we understand from all this bear-dancing up and down the room? asked Rachel. Ye must know if you are going to withdraw the boy from his schooling.

Dan cast an angry glance at his mother and hated her; and then his heart misgave him, for he knew that he lacked courage to take Joseph out of his present schooling, and dared not divide his house against himself, or do anything that might lose him his son's love and little by little cause himself to be looked upon as a tyrant. He knew himself to be a weak man, except in the counting-house; he knew it, and must stifle his jealousy of Azariah, who had forgiven Joseph his truancy and was the only one that knew of the excursion into Tiberias. But Azariah's indulgence did not altogether please him. He began to suspect it and to doubt if he had acted wisely in not ordering Joseph away from Azariah: for Azariah was robbing him, robbing him of all that he valued in this world, his son! And it seemed to him a little later in the day, as he closed his ledger, that he had come to be disregarded in his own house; and he thought he would have liked much better to stay away, to dine in the counting-house, urging a press of business. The first thing he would hear would be "Azariah." The hated name was never off the boy's lips: he talked of nothing else but Azariah and Hebrew and Greek and the learned Jews whom he met at Azariah's house.

Dan sat looking into the dusk asking himself if his bargain were not that his son should learn the Greek language but not Greek literature, which is full of heresy, he said to himself; and he returned home determined to raise the point; but Joseph told him, and he thought rather abruptly, that it was only through Greek literature that one could learn Greek in Tiberias—the spoken language was a dialect.

It may have been that Joseph perceived that praise of Azariah caused his father to writhe a little, and—curious to observe the effect—he spoke more of Azariah than he would have done otherwise, and laid an accent on his master's learning, and related incidents in which his master appeared to great advantage, causing his father much perplexity and pain of mind, till at last, unable to bear the torture any longer, he said—the words slipped from him incontinently—you're no better than a little Azariah! and, unable to contain himself, he rushed from the room, leaving Joseph and Rachel to discuss his vehemence and discover motives which he hoped would not include the right one. But afraid that he had betrayed his jealousy of Azariah he returned, and to mislead his mother and son he began to speak of the duty of the pupil to the master, telling Joseph he must submit himself to Azariah in everything: by representing Azariah as one in full authority he hoped to overcome his influence and before many months had passed over a different accent was notable in Joseph's voice when he spoke of Azariah; but he continued with him for two more years. And it was then that Dan set himself to devise plans to end his son's studies in Hebrew and Greek.

Joseph knows now all that Azariah can teach him, and it is high time that I took him in hand and taught him his trade. But though determined to rid himself of Azariah he felt he must proceed gently (if possible, in conjunction with his mother); he must wait for an occasion; and while he was watching for one it fell out that Joseph wearied of Azariah and went to his father saying that he had learnt Hebrew and could speak Greek, so there was no use in his returning to Azariah any more. At first his parents could only think that he had; quarrelled with Azariah, but it was not so, they soon discovered that he had merely become tired of him—a change that betokened a capricious mind. A growing boy is full of fancies, Rachel said: an explanation that Dan deemed sufficient, and he was careful not to speak against Azariah lest he should turn his son's thoughts back on Greek literature, or Greek philosophy, which is more pernicious even than the literature. He did not dare to ask Joseph to come down to the counting-house, afraid lest by trying to influence him in one direction he might influence him in the opposite direction. He deemed it better to leave everything to fate, and while putting his trust in God Dan applied himself to meditate on the young man's character and his tastes, which seemed to have taken a sudden turn; for, to his father's surprise, Joseph had begun to put questions to him about the sale of fish, and to speak of visiting Tyre and Sidon with a view to establishing branch houses—extensions of their business. His father, while approving of this plan, pointed out that Tyre and Sidon being themselves on the coast of the sea could never be as good customers as inland cities, sea fish being considered, he thought mistakenly, preferable to lake. He had been doing, it is true, a fair trade with Damascus, but whereas it was impossible to reckon on Damascus it seemed to him that their industry might be extended in many other directions. And delighted with the change that had come over his son he said that he would have tried long ago to extend his business, if he had had knowledge of the Greek language.

He spoke of Heliopolis, and proposed to Joseph that he should go there and establish a mart for salt fish as soon as he had mastered all the details of the trade, which would be soon: a very little application in the counting-house would be enough for a clever fellow like Joseph.

As he said these words his eyes met Rachel's, and as soon as Joseph left the room she asked him if he believed that Joseph would settle down to the selling of salt fish: a question which was not agreeable to Dan, who was at that moment settling himself into the conviction that Joseph had begun to evince an aptitude for trade that he himself did not acquire till many years older, causing him to flame up as might be expected against his mother, telling her that her remarks were most mischievous, whether she meant them or not. He hoped Joseph was not the young man that she saw in him. Before he could say any more Joseph returned, and linked his arm into his father's, and the twain went away together to the counting-house, Dan enamoured of his son but just a little afraid all the same that Joseph might weary of trade in the end, just as he had wearied of learning. He was moved to speak his fear to Joseph, but on consideration he resolved that no good could come of such confidences, and on the evening of the first day in the counting-house he whispered to Rachel that Joseph had taken to trade as a duck to the water, as the saying is.

Day after day he watched his son's progress in administration, saying nothing, waiting for the head clerk to endorse his opinion that there were the makings of a first-rate man in Joseph. He was careful not to ask any leading questions, but he could not refrain from letting the conversation drop, so that the clerk might have an opportunity of expressing his opinion of Master Joseph's business capacities. But the clerk made no remark: it might as well have been that Joseph was not in the counting-house; Dan had begun to hate his clerk, who had been with him for thirty years. He had brought him from Arimathea and couldn't dismiss him; he could only look into his eyes appealingly. At last the clerk spoke, and his words were like manna in the desert; and, overjoyed, Dan wondered how it was that he could have refrained so long. It was concerning a certain falling off in an order: if Master Joseph were to go on a circuit through the Greek cities—Dan could have thrown his arms about his clerk for these words, but it were better to dissimulate. You think then that Joseph understands the business sufficiently? The clerk acquiesced, and it was a great day, of course, the day Joseph went forth; and in a few weeks Dan had proof that his confidence in his son's business aptitudes was not misplaced. Joseph showed himself to be suited to the enterprise by his engaging manner as well as by his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, the two languages procuring him an admission into the confidences of Jew and Gentile alike.

The length of these excursions was from three to four weeks, and when Joseph returned home for an interval his parents disputed as to whether he should spend his holiday in the counting-house or the dwelling-house. So to avoid giving offence to either, and for his own pleasure Joseph often spent these days on the boats with the fishers, learning their craft from them, losing himself often in meditations how the draught of fishes might be increased by a superior kind of net: interested in his trade far too much, Rachel said. His mind seemed bent on it always; whereas she would have liked to have heard him tell of all the countries he had been to and of all the people he had seen, but it was always about salt fish that he was talking: how many barrels had gone to this town, and how many barrels to another, and the new opening he had discovered for salt fish in a village the name of which he had never heard before.

Rachel's patience with Joseph was long but at last she lost patience and said she would be glad when the last barrel of salt fish came out of the lake, for it would not be till then that they would have time to live their lives in peace and comfort. She gathered up her knitting and was going to bed, but Joseph would not suffer her to go. He said he had stories to tell her, and he fell to telling of the several preachers he had heard in the synagogues, and his voice beguiled the evening away so pleasantly that Rachel let her knitting drop into her lap and sat looking at her grandson, stupefied and transported with love.

Dan's love for his son was more tender in these days than it had ever been before, but Rachel looked back, thinking the old days were better, when Joseph used to come from Azariah's talking about his studies. It may be that Dan, forgetful of his jealousy, looked back to those days gone over with a certain wistfulness. A boy is, if not more interesting, at least more unexpected, than a young man. In the old days Dan did not know what sort of son God had given him, but now he knew that God had given him the son he always desired, and that Azariah's tending of the boy's character had been kind, wise and salutary, as the flower and fruit showed. But in the deepest peace there is disquiet, and in the relation of his adventures Joseph had begun to display interest in various interpretations of Scripture which he had heard in the synagogues—true that he laughed at these, but he had met learned heretics from Alexandria in Azariah's house. Dan often wondered if these had not tried to impregnate his mind with their religious theories and doctrines, for being without religious interests, Dan was strictly orthodox.

He did not suspect Azariah, whom he knew to be withal orthodox, as much as Azariah's friend, Apollonius, the Alexandrian Jew. But though he kept his ears open for the slightest word he could not discover any trace of his influence. If his discourse had had any effect, it was to make Joseph more than ever a Pharisee. He was sometimes even inclined to think that Joseph was a little too particular, laying too much stress upon the practice of minute observances, and he began to apprehend that there was something of the Scribe in Joseph after all. The significance of his mother's words becoming suddenly clear to Dan, he asked himself if it were not yet within the width of a finger that Joseph would tire of trade and retire to Jerusalem and expound the law and the traditions in the Temple. His vocation, Dan was of opinion, could not yet be predicted with any certainty: he might go either way—to trade or to religious learning—and in the midst of these meditations on his son's character Dan remembered that some friends had come to see Joseph at the counting-house yesterday. Joseph had taken them out into the yard and they had talked together, but it was not of the export of salt fish they had spoken, but of the observances of the Sabbath. Dan had listened, pen in hand, his thoughts suspended, and had heard them devote many minutes to the question whether a man should dip himself in the nearest brook if he had accidentally touched a pig. He had heard them discuss at length the grace that should be used before eating fruit from a tree, and whether it were necessary to say three graces after eating three kinds of fruit at one meal. He had heard one ask if a sheep that had been killed with a Greek knife could be eaten, and he had heard Joseph ask him if he knew the sheep had been killed with a Greek knife and the man confess that he had not made inquiry. If he had known—

Dan did not hear the end of the sentence, but imagined that it ended in a gesture of abhorrence. In his day religion was limited to the law of Moses, a skein well combed out, but the Scribes in Jerusalem had knotted and twisted the skein. He had heard Joseph maintain, and stiffly too, that an egg laid on the day after the Sabbath could not be eaten, because it had been prepared by the hen on the Sabbath. But one can't always be watching hens, he said to himself, and the discussion of such points seeming to him unmanly, he drew back the window-curtain and fell into admiration of his son's slim loins and great shoulders. Joseph was laughing with his companions at that moment and his teeth glistened, every one white and shapely. Why do such discussions interest him? Dan asked, for his eyes are soft as flowers; and he envied the woman that Joseph would resort unto in the night. But very often men like Joseph did not marry, and a new disquietude arose in his mind: he wanted children, grandchildren. In a few years Joseph should begin to look round.... Meanwhile it might be well to tell him that men like Hillel had always held that it is after the spirit rather than the letter we should strive, and that in running after the latter we are apt to lose the former, and he accepted the first opportunity to admonish Joseph, who listened in amazement, wondering what had befallen his father, whom he had never heard speak like this before. All the same he hearkened to these warnings and laid them in his memory, and fell to considering his father as one who had just jogged along the road that he and his ancestors had come by, without much question. But if his father had set himself to consider religions, and with that seriousness they deserved, he would not keep back any longer the matter on which he had long desired to speak to him.

The young men to whom he had just bidden good-bye were all going to Jerusalem, whither Dan was accustomed to go every year for the Feast of the Passover, but last year the journey thither had fatigued him unduly, and it seemed to Joseph that this year he should go to Jerusalem in his father's place; and when he broached the subject, Dan, who had been thinking for some time that he was not feeling strong enough for this journey, welcomed Joseph's proposal—a most proper presence Joseph's would be at the Feast. Joseph had come to the age when he should visit Jerusalem, but he did not readily understand this sudden enthusiasm. If he wanted to go to Jerusalem to the Feast of the Passover, why had he not said so before? And Dan, whose thoughts reached back to the discussion overheard in the yard, was compelled to ask Joseph if it were for the purpose of discussing the value of certain minute points of law that he wished to go to Jerusalem. At which Joseph was astonished that his father should have asked him such a thing.... Yet why not? For awhile back he was discussing such very points with some young gossips. His tongue wagged as was its wont on all occasions, though his mind was away and he suddenly stopped speaking; and when the stirring of his father's feet on the floor awakened him, he saw his father sitting pen in hand watching him and no doubt asking himself of what great and wonderful thing his son was thinking.

Once again actuality disappeared. He stood engulfed in memories of things heard in Azariah's house: or things only half heard, for he had never thought of them since. The words of the Jews he met there had fallen dead at the time, but now he remembered things that had passed over his mind. The heresies of the Jews in Alexandria awoke in him, and a marvellous longing awoke to see the world. First of all he must begin with Jerusalem, and he bade his father good-bye with an eagerness not too pleasant to the old man.

CHAP. V.

Gone to the study of the law! Dan said, as he walked up and down the room, glancing often into Joseph's letter, for it figured to him the Temple with the Scribes meditating on the law, or discussing it with each other while their wives remained at home doing the work. So do their lives pass over, he said, in the study of the law. Nothing else is to them of any worth.... My poor boy hopes that I shall forgive him for not returning home after the Feast of the Passover! Does he suspect that I would prefer him indifferent to the law in Magdala, rather than immersed in it at Jerusalem? A little surprised and shocked at the licentiousness of his thoughts, he drew them into order with the admission that it is better in every way that a young man should go to Jerusalem early in his life and acquire reverence for the ritual and traditions of his race, else he will drift later on into heresy, or maybe go to live in cities like Tiberias, amongst statues. But why do I trouble myself like this? For there was a time before I had a son, and the time is getting very close now when I shall lose him. And Dan stood swallowed up in the thought of the great gulf into which precarious health would soon pitch him out of sight of Joseph for ever. It was Rachel coming into the room that awoke him. She too! he muttered. He began to fuss about, seeking for writing materials, for he was now intent to send Joseph a letter of recommendation to the High Priest, having already forgotten the gulf that awaited him, in the pleasurable recollection of the courtesy and consideration he received from the most distinguished men the last time he was in Jerusalem—from Hanan the son of Seth and father-in-law of Kaiaphas: Kaiaphas was now High Priest, the High Priest of that year; but in truth, Hanan, who had been High Priest before him, retained all the power and importance of the office and was even called the High Priest. Dan remembered that he had been received with all the homage due to a man of wealth. He liked his wealth to be acknowledged, for it was part of himself: he had created it; and it was with pride that he continued his letter to Hanan recommending his son to him, saying that anything that was done to further Joseph's interests would be a greater favour than any that could be conferred on himself.

The letter was sent off by special messenger and Joseph was enjoined to carry it himself at once to Hanan, which he did, since it was his father's pleasure that he should do so. He would have preferred to be allowed to pick his friends from among the people he met casually, but since this was not to be he assumed the necessary reverence and came forward in the proper spirit to meet Hanan, who expressed himself as entirely gratified by Joseph's presence in Jerusalem and promised to support his election for the Sanhedrin. But if the councillors reject me? For you see I am still a young man. The innocency of Joseph's remark pleased Hanan, who smiled over it, expressing a muttered hope that the Sanhedrin would not take upon itself the task of discussing the merits and qualifications of those whom he should deem worthy to present for election. The great man purred out these sentences, Joseph's remark having reminded him of his exalted position. But thinking his remark had nettled Hanan, Joseph said: you see I have only just come to Jerusalem; and this remark continued the flattery, and with an impulsive movement Hanan took Joseph's hands and spoke to him about his father in terms that made Joseph feel very proud of Dan, and also of being in Jerusalem, which had already begun to seem to him more wonderful than he had imagined it to be: and he had imagined it very wonderful indeed. But there was a certain native shrewdness in Joseph; and after leaving the High Priest's place he had not taken many steps before he began to see through Hanan's plans: which no doubt are laid with the view to impress me with the magnificence of Jerusalem and its priesthood. He walked a few yards farther, and remembered that there are always dissensions among the Jews, and that the son of a rich man (one of first-rate importance in Galilee) would be a valuable acquisition to the priestly caste.

But though he saw through Hanan's designs, he was still the dupe of Hanan, who was a clever man and a learned man; his importance loomed up very large, and Joseph could not be without a hero, true or false; so it could not be otherwise than that Hanan and Kaiaphas and the Sadducees, whom Joseph met in the Sanhedrin and whose houses he frequented, commanded his admiration for several months and would have held it for many months more, had it not been that he happened to be a genuinely religious man, concerned much more with an intimate sense of God than with the slaying of bullocks and rams.

He had accepted the sacrifices as part of a ritual which should not be questioned and which he had never questioned: yet, without discussion, without argument, they fell in his estimation without pain, as naturally as a leaf falls. A friend quoted to him a certain well-known passage in Isaiah, and not the whole of it: only a few words; and from that moment the Temple, the priests and the sacrifices became every day more distasteful to him than they were the day before, setting him pondering on the mind of the man who lives upon religion while laughing in his beard at his dupe; he contrasted him with the fellow that drives in his beast for slaughter and pays his yearly dole; he remembered how he loved the prophets instinctively though the priests always seemed a little alien, even before he knew them. Yet he never imagined them to be as far from true religion (which is the love of God) as he found them; for they did not try to conceal their scepticism from him: knowing him to be a friend of the High Priest, it had seemed to them that they might indulge their wit as they pleased, and once he had even to reprove some priests, so blasphemous did their jests appear to him. An unusually fat bullock caused them to speak of the fine regalement he would be to Jahveh's nostrils. One sacristan, mentioning the sacred name, figured Jahveh as pressing forward with dilated nostrils. There is no belly in heaven, he said: its joys are entirely olfactory, and when this beast is smoking, Jahveh will call down the angels Michael and Gabriel. As if not satisfied with this blasphemy, as if it were not enough, he turned to the sacristans by him, to ask them if they could not hear the angels sniffing as they leaned forward out of their clouds. My priests are doing splendidly: the fat of this beast is delicious in our nostrils; were the words he attributed to Jahveh. Michael and Gabriel, he said, would reply: it is indeed as thou sayest, Sire!

Joseph marvelled that priests could speak like this, and tried to forget the vile things they said, but they were unforgettable: he treasured them in his heart, for he could not do else, and when he did speak, it was at first cautiously, though there was little need for caution; for he found to his surprise that everybody knew that the Sadducees did not believe in a future life and very little in the dogma that the Jews were the sect chosen by God, Jahveh. He was their God and had upheld the Jewish race, but for all practical purposes it was better to put their faith henceforth in the Romans, who would defend Jerusalem against all barbarians. It was necessary to observe the Sabbath and to preach its observances and to punish those who violated it, for on the Sabbath rested the entire superstructure of the Temple itself, and all belief might topple if the Sabbath was not maintained, and rigorously. In the houses of the Sadducees Joseph heard these very words, and their crude scepticism revolted his tender soul: he was drawn back to his own sect, the Pharisees, for however narrow-minded and fanatical they might be he could not deny to them the virtue of sincerity. It was with a delightful sense of community of spirit that he returned to them, and in the conviction that it would be well to let pass without protest the observances which himself long ago in Galilee began to look upon with amusement.

A sudden recollection of the discussion that had arisen in the yard behind the counting-house, whether an egg could be eaten if it had been laid the day after the Sabbath, brought a smile to his face, but a different smile from of yore, for he understood now better than he had understood then, that this (in itself a ridiculous) question was no more serious than a bramble that might for a moment entangle the garment of a wayfarer: of little account was the delay, if the feet were on the right road. Now the scruple of conscience that the question had awakened might be considered as a desire to live according to a law which, observed for generations, had become part of the national sense and spirit. On this he fell to thinking that it is only by laws and traditions that we may know ourselves—whence we have come and whither we are going. He attributed to these laws and traditions the love of the Jewish race for their God, and their desire to love God, and to form their lives in obedience to what they believed to be God's will. Without these rites and observances their love of God would not have survived. It was not by exaggeration of these laws but by the scepticism of the Sadducees that the Temple was polluted. If the priests degraded religion and made a vile thing of it, there were others that ennobled the Temple by their piety.

And as these thoughts passed through Joseph's mind, his eyes went to the simple folk who never asked themselves whether they were Sadducees or Pharisees, but were content to pray around the Temple that the Lord would not take them away till they witnessed the triumph of Israel, never asking if the promised resurrection would be obtained in this world—if not in each individual case, by the race itself—or whether they would all be lifted by angels out of their graves and carried away by them into a happy immortality.

The simple folk on whom Joseph's eyes rested favourably, prayed, untroubled by difficult questions: they were content to love God; and, captured by their simple unquestioning faith, which he felt to be the only spiritual value in this world, he was glad to turn away from both Sadducees and Pharisees and mix with them. Sometimes, and to his great regret, he brought about involuntarily the very religious disputations that it was his object to quit for ever when he withdrew himself from the society of the Pharisees. A chance word was enough to set some of them by the ears, asking each other whether the soul may or can descend again into the corruptible body; and it was one day when this question was being disputed that a disputant, pressing forward, announced his belief that the soul, being alone immortal, does not attempt to regain the temple of the body. A doctrine which astonished Joseph, so simple did it seem and so reasonable; and as he stood wondering why he had not thought of it himself, his eyes telling his perplexity, he was awakened from his dream, and his awakening was caused by the word "Essene." He asked for a meaning to be put upon it, to the great astonishment of the people, who were not aware that the fame of this third sect of the Jews was not yet spread into Galilee. There were many willing to instruct him, and almost the first thing he learnt about them was that they were not viewed with favour in Jerusalem, for they did not send animals to the Temple for sacrifice, deeming blood-letting a crime. A still more fundamental tenet of this sect was its denial of private property: all they had, belonged to one brother as much as to another, and they lived in various places, avoiding cities, and setting up villages of their own accord; notably one on the eastern bank of the Jordan, from whence recruiting missionaries sometimes came forth, for the Essenes disdained marriage, and relied on proselytism for the maintenance of the order. The rule of the Essenes, however, did not exclude marriage because they believed the end of the world was drawing nigh, but because they wished to exclude all pleasure from life. To do this, to conceive the duty of man to be a cheerful exclusion of all pleasure, seemed to Joseph wonderful, an exaltation of the spirit that he had not hitherto believed man to be capable of: and one night, while thinking of these things, he fell on a resolve that he would go to Jericho on the morrow to see for himself if all the tales he heard about the brethren were true. At the same time he looked forward to getting away from the seven windy hills where the sun had not been seen for days, only grey vapour coiling and uncoiling and going out, and where, with a patter of rain in his ears, he was for many days crouching up to a fire for warmth.

But in Jericho he would be as it were back in Galilee: a pleasant winter resort, to be reached easily in a day by a path through the hills, so plainly traced by frequent usage that a guide was not needed. A servant he could not bring with him, for none was permitted in the cenoby, a different mode and colour of life prevailing there from any he ever heard of, but he hoped to range himself to it, and—thinking how this might be done—he rode round the hillside, coming soon into view of Bethany over against the desert. From thence he proceeded by long descents into a land tossed into numberless hills and torn up into such deep valleys that it seemed to him to be a symbol of God's anger in a moment of great provocation. Or maybe, he said to himself, these valleys are the ruts of the celestial chariot that passed this way to take Elijah up to heaven? Or maybe ... His mind was wandering, and—forgetful of the subject of his meditation—he looked round and could see little else but strange shapes of cliffs and boulders, rocks and lofty scarps enwrapped in mist so thick that he fell to thinking whence came the fume? For rocks are breathless, he said, and there are only rocks here, only rocks and patches of earth in which the peasants sow patches of barley. At that moment his mule slid in the slime of the path to within a few inches of a precipice, and Joseph uttered a cry before the gulf which startled a few rain-drenched crows that went away cawing, making the silence more melancholy than before. A few more inches, Joseph thought, and we should have been over, though a mule has never been known to walk or to slide over a precipice. A moment after, his mule was climbing up a heap of rubble; and when they were at the top Joseph looked over the misted gulf, thinking that if the animal had crossed his legs mule and rider would both be at the bottom of a ravine by now. And the crows that my cry startled, he said, would soon return, scenting blood. He rode on, thinking of the three crows, and when he returned to himself the mule was about to pass under a projecting rock, regardless, he thought, of the man on his back, but the sagacious animal had taken his rider's height into his consideration, so it seemed, for at least three inches were to spare between Joseph's head and the rock. Nor did the mule's sagacity end here; for finding no trace of the path on the other side he started to climb the steep hill as a goat might, frightening Joseph into a tug or two at the bridle, to which the mule gave no heed but continued the ascent with conviction and after a little circuit among intricate rocks turned down the hill again and slid into the path almost on his haunches. A wonderful animal truly! Joseph said, marvelling greatly; he guessed that the path lay under the mass of rubble come down in some landslip. He knew he would meet it farther on: he may have been this way before. A wonderful animal all the same, a perfect animal, if he could be persuaded not to walk within ten inches of the brink! and Joseph drew the mule away to the right, under the hillside, but a few minutes after, divining that his rider's thoughts were lost in those strange argumentations common to human beings, the mule returned to the brink, out of reach of any projecting rocks. He was happily content to follow the twisting road, giving no faintest attention to the humped hills always falling into steep valleys and always rising out of steep valleys, as round and humped as the hills that were left behind. Joseph noticed the hills, but the mule did not: he only knew the beginning and the end of his journey, whereas Joseph began very soon to be concerned to learn how far they were come, and as there was nobody about who could tell him he reined up his mule, which began to seek herbage—a dandelion, an anemone, a tuft of wild rosemary—while his rider meditated on the whereabouts of the inn. The road, he said, winds round the highest of these hills, reaching at last a tableland half-way between Jerusalem and Jericho, and on the top of it is the inn. We shall see it as soon as yon cloud lifts.

CHAP. VI.

A few wanderers loitered about the inn: they came from Mount Sinai, so the innkeeper said; he mentioned that they had a camel and an ass in the paddock; and Joseph was surprised by the harshness with which the innkeeper rushed from him and told the wanderers that they waited in vain.

They were strange and fierce, remote like the desert, whence they had come; and he was afraid of them like the innkeeper, but began to pity them when he heard that they had not tasted food for a fortnight, only a little camel's milk. They're waiting for me to give them the rinsings, the innkeeper said, if any should remain at the bottom of the barrel: you see, all water has to be brought to the inn in an ox-cart. There's no well on the hills and we sell water to those who can afford to pay for it. Then let the man drink his fill, Joseph answered, and his wife too. And his eyes examined the woman curiously, for he never saw so mean a thing before: her small beady eyes were like a rat's, and her skin was nearly as brown. Twenty years of desert wandering leave them like mummies, he reflected; and the child, whom the mother enjoined to come forward and to speak winningly to the rich man, though in her early teens was as lean and brown and ugly as her mother. Marauders they sometimes were, but now they seemed so poor that Joseph thought he could never have seen poverty before, and took pleasure in distributing figs amongst them. Let them not see your money when you pay me, the innkeeper said, for half a shekel they would have my life, and many's the time they'd have had it if Pilate, our governor, had not sent me a guard. The twain spoke of the new procurator till Joseph mounted his mule. I'll see that none of them follow you, the innkeeper whispered; and Joseph rode away down the lower hills, alongside of precipices and through narrow defiles, following the path, which debouched at last on to a shallow valley full of loose stones and rocks. I suppose the mule knows best, Joseph said, and he held the bridle loosely and watched the rain, regretting that the downpour should have begun in so exposed a place, but so convinced did the animal seem that the conduct of the journey should be left entirely to his judgment that it was vain to ask him to hasten his pace, and he continued to clamber down loose heaps of stones, seeking every byway unnecessarily, Joseph could not help thinking, but bringing his rider and himself safely, he was forced to admit, at the foot of the hills over against Jericho. Another toiling ascent was begun, and Joseph felt a trickle of rain down his spine, while the mule seemed to debate with himself whether shelter was to be sought, and spying a rock a little way up the hillside he trotted straight to it and entered the cave—the rock projected so far beyond a hill that it might be called a cave, and better shelter from the rain they could not have found. A wonderful animal, thou'rt surely, knowing everything, Joseph said, and the mule shook the rain out of his long ears, and Joseph stood at the mouth of the cave, watching the rain falling and gathering into pools among the rocks, wondering the while if this land was cast away into desert by the power of the Almighty God because of the worship of the Golden Calf; and then remembering that it was cast into desert for the sins of the cities of the plain, he said: how could I have thought else? As soon as this rain ceases we will go up the defile and at the end of it the lake will lie before us deep down under the Moab mountains. He remembered too that he would have to reach to the cenoby before the day was over, or else sleep in Jericho.

The sky seemed to be brightening: at that moment he heard footsteps. He was unarmed and the hills were infested by robbers. The steps continued to approach....

His hope was that the man might be some innocent shepherd in search of a lost ewe: if he were a robber, that he might pass on, unsuspicious of a traveller seeking shelter from the rain in a cave a little way up the hillside. The man came into view of the cave and stood for some time in front of it, his back turned to Joseph, looking round the sky, and then, like one who has lost hope in the weather, he hastened on his way. As soon as he was out of sight, Joseph led out his mule, clambered into the saddle, and digging his heels into the mule's sides, galloped the best part of a mile till he reached the Roman fort overlooking the valley. If a robber was to emerge, a Roman soldier would speedily come to his assistance; but behind him and the fort were some excellent lurking-places, Joseph thought, for robbers, and again his heels went into his mule. But this time, as if he knew that haste was no longer necessary, the mule hitched up his back and jangled his bells so loudly that again Joseph's heart stood still. He was within sight of Jericho, but half-way down the descent a group of men were waiting, as if for travellers. His best chance was to consider them as harmless passengers, so he rode on, and the beggars—for they were no more—held up maimed leprous limbs to excite his pity.

He was now within two miles of Jericho, and he rode across the sandy plain, thinking of the Essenes and the cenoby on the other side of Jordan. He rode in full meditation, and it was not till he was nigh the town of Jericho that he attempted to think by which ford he should cross Jordan: whether by ferry, in which case he must leave his mule in Jericho; or by a ford higher up the stream, if there was a ford practicable at this season; which is doubtful, he said to himself, as he came within view of the swollen river. And he hearkened to one who declared the river to be dangerous to man and beast: but another told him differently, and being eager to reach the cenoby he determined to test the ford.

If the water proved too strong he would return to Jericho, but the mule plunged forward, and at one moment it was as like as not that the flood would carry them away into the lake beyond, but Joseph's weight enabled the animal to keep on his hooves, and the water shallowing suddenly, the mule reached the opposite bank. It was my weight that saved us, Joseph said; and dismounting, he waited for the panting animal to recover breath. We only just did it. The way to the cenoby? he called out to a passenger along the bank, and was told he must hasten, for the Essenes did not receive anybody after sunset: which may or may not be true, he muttered, as he pursued his way, his eyes attracted and amused by the long shadow that himself and his mule projected over the wintry earth. He was tempted to tickle the animal's long ears with a view to altering the silhouette, and then his thoughts ran on into the cenoby and what might befall him yonder; for that must be it, he said, looking forward and discovering a small village on the lower slopes of the hills, on the ground shelving down towards the river.

His mule, scenting food and rest, began to trot, though very tired, and half-an-hour afterwards Joseph rode into a collection of huts, grouped—but without design—round a central building which he judged to be an assembly hall whither the curators, of whom he had heard, met for the transaction of the business of the community. And no doubt, he said, it serves for a refectory, for the midday meal which gathers all the brethren for the breaking of bread. As he was thinking of these things, one of the brethren laid hands on the bridle and asked him whom he might be wishing to see; to which question Joseph answered: the Head. The brother replied: so be it; and tethered the mule to a post at the corner of the central hut, begging Joseph to enter and seat himself on one of the benches, of which there were many, and a table long enough to seat some fifty or sixty.

He recognised the place he was in as the refectory, where the rite of the breaking of bread was accomplished. To-morrow I shall witness it, he said, and felt like dancing and singing in his childish eagerness. But the severity of the hall soon quieted his mood, and he remembered he must collect his thoughts and prepare his story for recital, for he would be asked to give an account of himself. As he was preparing his story, the president entered: a tall man of bulk, with the pallor of age in his face and in the hand that lifted the black taffeta cap from his head. The courteousness of the greeting did more than to put Joseph at his ease, as the saying is. In a few moments he was confiding himself to this man of kindly dignity, whose voice was low, who seemed to speak always from the heart, and it was wholly delightful to tell the great Essene that he was come from Galilee to attend the Feast of the Passover in his father's place, and that after having allied himself in turn to the Sadducees and the Pharisees he came to hear of the Essenes: I have come thither, hoping to find the truth here. You have truthful eyes, said the president; and, thus encouraged, Joseph told that there were some in the Temple, the poor who worship God daily with a whole heart. It was from them, he said, that I heard of your doctrines. Of which you can have obtained only the merest outline, the president answered; and perhaps when you know us better our rule may seem too hard for you to follow, or it may be that you will feel that you are called to worship God differently from us. But it matters naught how we worship, if our worship come from the heart.

The word "heart" startled Joseph out of himself, and his eyes falling at that moment on the Essene he was moved to these words: Father, I could never disobey thee. Let me stay, put me to the tests. But the tests are long, the president answered; we would not suffer you to return to Jericho to-night, even if you wished it. Your mule is tired and would be swept away by the descending flood. You will remain with us for to-night and for as long after it as pleases you—to the end of your probationship and after, if you prove yourself worthy of admission. Meanwhile you will be given a girdle, a white garment and a little axe. You will sleep in one of the outlying huts. Come with me and I will take you round our village. We shall meet on our way some of the brothers returning from their daily tasks, for we all have a craft: many of us are husbandmen; the two coming towards us carrying spades are from the fields, and that one turning down the lane is a shepherd; he has just folded his flock, but he will return to them with his dogs, for we suffer a great deal from the ravages of wild beasts with which the woods are thronged, wolves especially. In our community there are healers, and these study the medicinal properties of herbs. If you resolve to remain with us, you will choose a craft.

Joseph mentioned that the only craft he knew was dry-salting, and it was disappointing to hear that there were no fish in the lake.

There is a long time of probationship before one is admitted, the president continued, and when that is concluded another long time must pass over before the proselyte is called to join us at the common repasts. Before he breaks bread with us he must bind himself by oath to be always pious towards the Divinity, to observe justice towards men, and to injure no one voluntarily or by command: to hate always the unjust and never to shrink from taking part in the conflict on the side of the just; to show fidelity to all and especially to those who rule. Thou'lt soon begin to understand that rule doesn't fall to anyone except by the will of God. I have never deserved to rule, but headship came to me, he added half sadly, as if he feared he had not been sufficiently exacting. After asking Joseph whether he felt himself strong enough to obey so severe a rule, he passed from father to teacher. Every one of us must love truth and make it his purpose to confute those who speak falsehood; to keep his hands from stealing and his soul from unjust gain. He must never conceal anything from a member of the order, nor reveal its secrets to others, even if he should have to suffer death by withholding them; and above all, while trying to engage proselytes he must speak the doctrines only as he has heard them from us. Thou'lt return perhaps to Jerusalem....

He broke off to speak to the brothers who were passing into the village from their daily work, and presented Joseph as one who, shocked by the service of the Sadducees in the Temple, had come desiring admission to their order. At the news of a new adherent, the faces of the brothers became joyous; for though the rule seems hard when related, they said, in practice, even at first, it seems light enough, and soon we do not feel it at all.

They were now on the outskirts of the village, and pointing to a cabin the Essene told Joseph that he would sleep there and enter on the morrow upon his probationship. But, Father, may I not hear more? If a brother be found guilty of sin, will he be cast out of the order? The president answered that if one having been admitted to their community committed sins deserving of death, he was cast out and often perished by a most wretched fate, for being bound by oath and customs he could not even receive food from others but must eat grass, and with his body worn by famine he perishes. Unless, the president added, we have pity on him at the last breath and think he has suffered sufficiently for his sins.

CHAP. VII.

The hut that Joseph was bidden to enter was the last left in the cenoby for allotment, four proselytes having arrived last month.

No better commodity have we for the moment, the curator said, struck by the precarious shelter the hut offered—a crazy door and a roof that let the starlight through at one end of the wall. But the rains are over, he added, and the coverlet is a warm one. On this he left Joseph, whom the bell would call to orison, too tired to sleep, turning vaguely from side to side, trying to hush the thoughts that hurtled through his clear brain—that stars endure for ever, but the life of the palm-tree was as the life of the man who fed on its fruit. The tree lived one hundred years, and among the Essenes a centenarian was no rare thing, but of what value to live a hundred years in the monotonous life of the cenoby? And in his imagination, heightened by insomnia, the Essenes seemed to him like the sleeping trees. If he remained he would become like them, while his father lived alone in Galilee! Dan rose up before him and he could find no sense in the assurances he had given the president that he wished to be admitted into the order. He seemed no longer to desire admission, and if he did desire it he could not, for his father's sake, accept the admission. Then why had he talked as he had done to the president? He could not tell: and it must have been while lying on his right side, trying to understand himself, what he was and why he was in the cenoby, that he fell into that deep and dreamless sleep from which he was awakened by a bell, and so suddenly that it seemed to him that he had not been asleep more than a few minutes. It was no doubt the bell for morning prayer: and only half awake he repaired with the other proselytes to the part of the village open to the sunrise.

All the Essenes were assembled there, and he learnt that they looked upon this prayer of thanksgiving for the return of light as the important event of the day. He joined in it, though he suspected a certain idolatry in the prayer. It seemed to him that the Essenes were praying for the sun to rise; but to do this would be to worship the sun in some measure, and to look upon the sun as in some degree a God, he feared; but the Essenes were certainly very pious Jews. What else they were, time would reveal to him: a few days would be enough; and long before the prayer was finished he was thinking of his father in Galilee and what his face would tell, were he to see his son bowing before the sun. But the Essenes were not really worshipping the sun but praying to God that the sun might rise and give them light again to continue their daily work. One whole day at least he must spend in the cenoby, and—feeling that he was becoming interested again in the Essenes—he began to form a plan to stay some time with them.

On rising from his knees, he thought he might stay for some weeks. But if the Essene brotherhood succeeded in persuading him that his fate was to abandon his father and the trade that awaited him in Galilee and the wife who awaited him somewhere? His father often said: Joseph, you are the last of our race. I hope to see with you a good wife who will bear you children, for I should like to bless my grandchildren before I die. The Essenes would at least free him from the necessity of telling his father that there was no heart in him for a wife; and if he did not take a wife, he might become—— One of the curators whispered to him the use he should make of the little axe, and he followed the other proselytes; and having found a place where the earth was soft, each dug a hole about a foot deep, into which they eased themselves, afterwards filling up the hole with the earth that had been taken out. Joseph then went down with them to a source for purifications, and these being finished the proselytes grouped themselves round Joseph, anxious to become acquainted with the last recruit, and asking all together what provision of food he had made for himself for that day: if he had made none, he would have to go without food, for only those who were admitted into the order were suffered to the common repasts. A serious announcement, he said, to make to a man at break of day who knew nothing of these things yesterday, and he asked how his omission might be repaired. He must ask for permission to go to Jericho to buy food. As he was going there on a mule, he might bring back food not only for himself but for all of them: enough lentils to last a week; and he inquired what else they were permitted to eat—if eggs were forbidden? At which the proselytes clapped their hands. A basket of eggs! A basket of eggs! And some honey! cried another. Figs! cried a third; we haven't tasted any for a month. But my mule's back will not bear all that you require, Joseph answered. Our mule! cried the proselytes; all property is held in common. Even the fact of my mule having become common property, Joseph said, will not enable him to carry more than his customary burden, and the goods will embarrass me. If the mule belongs to the community, then I am the mule driver, the provider of the community. Constituted such by thy knowledge of the aptitudes and temper and strength of the animal! cried a proselyte after him, and he went away to seek out one of the curators; for it is not permissible for an Essene to go to Jericho without having gotten permission. Of course the permission was at once granted, and while saddling his mule for the journey the memory of the river overnight now caused Joseph to hesitate and to think that he might find himself return empty-handed to the plump of proselytes now waiting to see him start.

But if thou crossed the river yesterday, there is no reason why thou shouldn't cross it in safety now, cried one. But forget not the basket of eggs, said a second. Nor the honey, mentioned a third, and a fourth called after him the quality of lentils he enjoyed. The mind of the fifth regarding food was not expressed, for a curator came by and reproved them, saying they were mere belly-worshippers.

There will be less water in the river than there was overnight, the curator said, and Joseph hoped he was right, for it would be a harsh and disagreeable death to drown in a lake so salt that fish could not live in it. True, one would escape being eaten by fishes; but if the mule be carried away, he said to himself, drown I shall, long before I reach the lake, unless indeed I strike out and swim—which, it seemed to him, might be the best way to save his life—and if there be no current in the lake I can gain the shore easily. But the first sight of the river proved the vanity of his foreboding, for during the night it had emptied a great part of its flood into the lake. The struggle in getting his mule across was slight; still slighter when he returned with a sack of lentils, a basket of eggs, some pounds of honey and many misgivings as to whether he should announce this last commodity to the curator or introduce it surreptitiously. To begin his probationship with a surreptitious act would disgrace him in the eyes of the prior, whose good opinion he valued above all. So did his thoughts run on till he came within sight of a curator, who told him that sometimes, on the first day of probationship, honey and figs were allowed.

The cooking of the food and the eating of it in the only cabin in which there were conveniences for eating helped the time away, and Joseph began to ask himself how long his cloistral life was going to endure, for he seemed to have lost all desire to leave it, and had begun to turn the different crafts over in his mind and to debate which he should choose to put his hand to. Of husbandry he was as ignorant as a crow, nor could he tell poisonous pastures from wholesome, nor could he help in the bakery. At first venture there seemed to be no craft for him to follow, since fish did not thrive in the Salt Lake and the fisherman's art could not be practised, he was told, in the Jordan, for the Essenes were not permitted to kill any living thing.

While laying emphasis on this rule, the curator cracked a flea under his robe, but Joseph did not call his attention to his disobedience, but bowed his head and left him to the scruple of conscience which he hoped would awaken in him later.

Before this had time to come to pass, the curator called after him and suggested that he might teach Hebrew to the four proselytes, whose knowledge of that language had seemed to Mathias, their instructor, disgracefully weak. They were all from Alexandria, like their teacher, and read the Scriptures in Greek; but the Essenes, so said the curator, must read the Scriptures in Hebrew; and the teaching of Hebrew, Mathias said to Joseph, takes me away from my important work, but it may amuse you to teach them. Our father may accept you as a sufficient teacher: go to him for examination.

A little talk and a few passages read from the Scriptures satisfied the president that Joseph was the assistant teacher that had been so long desired in the community, and he spoke to Joseph soothingly of Mathias, whose life work was the true interpretation of the Scriptures. But did the Scriptures need interpretation? Joseph asked himself, not daring to put questions to the president; and on an early occasion he asked Mathias what the president meant when he spoke of a true interpretation of the Scriptures, and was told that the true meaning of the Scriptures lay below the literal meaning. There can be no doubt, he said, that the Scriptures must be regarded as allegories; and he explained to Joseph that he devoted all his intellect to discovering and explaining these allegories, a task demanding extraordinary assiduity, for they lay concealed in what seemed to the vulgar eye mere statements of fact: as if, he added scornfully, God chose the prophets for no better end than a mere relation of facts! He was willing, however, to concede that his manner of treating the Scriptures was not approved by the entire community, but in view of his learning, the proselytes were admitted to his lectures—one of the innovations of the prior, who, in spite of all, remained one of his supporters.

To the end of his life Joseph kept in his memory the moment when he sat in the corner of the hall, his eyes fixed upon Mathias's young and beautiful profile, clear cut, hard and decisive as the profiles of the young gods that decorated the Greek coins which shocked him in Cæsarea. His memory of Mathias was as partial; but he knew the president's full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile. Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph's consciousness. The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore it was natural that Mathias should hold, as if in fee, a great store of verbal felicities, and that he should translate all shades of thought at once into words.

His mind moved in a rich, erudite and complex syntax that turned all opposition into admiration. Even the president, who had been listening to theology all his life and had much business to attend to, must fain neglect some of it for the pleasure of listening to Mathias when he lectured. Even Saddoc, the most orthodox Jew in the cenoby, Mathias could keep as it were chained to his seat. He resented and spurned the allegory, but the beautiful voice that brought out sentence after sentence, like silk from off a spool, enticed his thoughts away from it. The language used in the cenoby was Aramaic, and never did Joseph hear that language spoken so beautifully. It seemed to him that he was listening to a new language and on leaving the hall he told Mathias that it had seemed to him that he was listening to Aramaic for the first time. Mathias answered him—blushing a little, Joseph thought—that he hoped one of these days, in Egypt perhaps, if Joseph ever went there, to lecture to him in Greek. He liked Aramaic for other purposes, but for philosophy there was but one language. But you speak Greek and are now teaching Greek, so let us speak it when we are together, Mathias said, and if I detect any incorrectness I will warn you against it.

That Mathias should choose to speak to him in Greek was flattering indeed, and Joseph, who had not spoken Greek for many months, began to prattle, but he had not said many words before Mathias interrupted him and said: you must have learnt Greek very young. This remark turned the talk on to Azariah; and Mathias listened to Joseph's account of his tutor carelessly, interrupting him when he had heard enough with a remark anent the advancement of the spring, to which Joseph did not know how to reply, so suddenly had his thoughts been jerked away from the subject he was pursuing. You have the full Jewish mind, Mathias continued; interested in moral ideas rather than beauty: without eyes for the village. True that you see it in winter plight, but in the near season all the fields will be verdant and the lintels running over with flowers. He waited for Joseph to defend himself, but Joseph did not know for certain that Mathias was not right—perhaps he was more interested in moral ideas than in beauty. However this might be, he began to experience an aversion, and might have taken leave of Mathias if they had not come upon the president. He stopped to speak to them; and having congratulated Mathias on having fortuned at last on an efficient teacher of Hebrew and Greek, and addressed a few kindly words directly to Joseph and taken his hand in his, the head of the community bade them both good-bye, saying that important business needed his presence. He sped away on his business, but he seemed to leave something of himself behind, and even Mathias was perforce distracted from his search of a philosophic point of view and indulged himself in the luxury of a simple remark. His goodness, he said, is so natural, like the air we breathe and the bread we eat, and that is why we all love him, and why all dissension vanishes at the approach of our president; a remarkable man.

The most wonderful I have ever seen, Joseph answered: a remark that did not altogether please Mathias, for he added: his power is in himself, for he is altogether without philosophy.

Joseph was moved to ask Mathias if the charm that himself experienced was not an entire absence of philosophy. But he did not dare to rouse Mathias, whom he feared, and his curiosity overcame his sense of loyalty to the president. If he were to take his leave abruptly, he would have to return alone to the village to seek the four proselytes, but their companionship did not attract him, and he found himself at that moment unable to deny himself the pleasure of the sweet refreshing evening air, which as they approached the river seemed to grow sweeter. The river itself was more attractive than he had yet seen it, and there was that sadness upon it which we notice when a rainy day passes into a fine evening. The clouds were rolling on like a battle—pennants flying in splendid array, leaving the last row of hills outlined against a clear space of sky; and, with his eyes fixed on the cliffs over against the coasts of the lake, Mathias let his thoughts run after his favourite abstractions: the relation of God to time and place. As he dreamed his metaphysics, he answered Joseph's questions from time to time, manifesting, however, so little interest in them that at last Joseph felt he could bear it no longer, and resolved to leave him. But just as he was about to bid him good-bye, Mathias said that the Essenes were pious Jews who were content with mere piety, but mere piety was not enough: God had given to man a mind, and therefore desired man to meditate, not on his own nature—which was trivial and passing—but on God's nature, which was important and eternal.

This remark revealed a new scope for inquiry to Joseph, who was interested in the Essenes; but his search was for miracles and prophets rather than ideas, and if he tarried among the Essenes it was because he had come upon two great men. He fell to considering the question afresh, and—forgetful of Mathias's admonitions that the business of man is to meditate on the nature of God—he said: the Essenes perform no miracles and do not prophesy;—an interruption to Mathias's loquacity which the other took with a better grace than Joseph had expected—for no one ever dared before to interrupt Mathias. Joseph had done so accidentally and expected a very fine reproof, but Mathias checked his indignation and told Joseph that Manahem, an Essene, had foreknowledge of future events given to him by God: for when he was a child and going to school, Manahem saw Herod and saluted him as king of the Jews; and Herod, thinking the boy was in jest or did not know him, told him he was but a private citizen; whereat Manahem smiled to himself, and clapping Herod on the backside with his hand said: thou wilt be king and wilt begin thy reign happily, for God finds thee worthy. And then, as if enough was said on this subject, Mathias began to diverge from it, mixing up the story with many admonitions and philosophical reflections, very wise and salutary, but not what Joseph cared to hear at that moment. He was in no wise interested at that moment to hear that he had done well in testing all the different sects of the Jews, and though the Essenes were certainly the most learned, they did not possess the whole truth. With a determination that was impossible to oppose, Mathias said: the whole truth is not to be found, even among the Essenes, and, my good friend, I would not encourage in you a hope that you may be permitted ever during your mortal life to discover the whole truth. It exists not in any created thing: but glimpses of the light are often detected, now here, now there, shining through a clouded vase. But the simile, he added, of the clouded vase gives rise to the thought that the light resides within the vase: the very contrary of which is the case. For there is no light in the vase itself: the light shines from beyond the skies, and I should therefore have compared man to a crystal itself that catches the light so well that it seems to our eyes to be the source of light, which is not true in principle or in fact, for in the darkness a crystal is as dark as any other stone. In such part do I explain the meaning that the wicked man, having no divine irradiation, is without instruction of God and knowledge of God's creations; he is as a fugitive from the divine company, and cannot do else than hold that everything is created from the world to be again dissolved into the world. And being no better than a follower of Heraclitus—But who is Heraclitus? Joseph asked.

A clouded face was turned upon Joseph, and for some moments the sage could not collect his thoughts sufficiently to answer him. Who is Heraclitus? he repeated, and then, with a general interest in his pupil, he ran off a concise exposition of that philosopher's doctrine—a mistake on his part, as he was quick enough to admit to himself; for though he reduced his statement to the lowest limits, it awakened in Joseph an interest so lively that he felt himself obliged to expose this philosopher's fallacies; and in doing this he was drawn away from his subject, which was unfortunate. The hour was near by when the Essenes would, according to rule, retire to their cells for meditation, and—foreseeing that he could not rid himself of the burden which Joseph's question imposed upon him—he abandoned Heraclitus in a last refutation, to warn Joseph that he must not resume his questions.

But if I do not ask at once, my chance is gone for ever; for your discourse is like the clouds, always taking new shapes, Joseph pleaded. In dread lest all be forgotten, I repeat to myself what you have said, and so lose a great deal for a certain remembrance.

Joseph's manifest delight in his statement of the doctrines of Heraclitus, and his subsequent refutation of the heathen philosopher caused Mathias to forget temporarily certain ideas that he had been fostering for some days—that God, being the designer and maker of all things, and their governor, is likewise the creator of time itself, for he is the father of its father, and the father of time is the world, which made its own mother—the creation. So that time stands towards God in the relation of a grandson; for this world is a young son of God. On these things the sage's thoughts had been running for some days past, and he would have liked to have expounded his theory to Joseph: that nothing is future to God: creations and the very boundaries of time are subject.

He said much more, but Joseph did not hear. He was too busy memorising what he had already heard, and during long hours he strove to come to terms with what he remembered, but in vain. The more he thought, the less clear did it seem to him that in eternity there is neither past nor future, that in eternity everything is present. Mathias's very words; but when he said them, there seemed to be something behind the words; while listening, it seemed to Joseph that sight had been given to him, but his eyes proved too weak to bear the too great illumination, and he had been obliged to cover them with his hands, shutting out a great deal so that he might see just a little ... as it were between his fingers. As we think of God only under the form of light, it seemed to him that the revelation entered into him by his eyes rather than by his ears. He would return to the sage every day, but what if he were not able to remember, if it were all to end in words with nothing behind the words? The sage said that in a little while the discourses would not seem so elusive and evanescent. At present they seemed to Joseph like the mist on the edge of a stream, and he strove against the belief that a philosopher is like a man who sets out to walk after the clouds.

Such a belief being detestable, he resolved to rid himself of it, and Mathias would help him, he was sure, and in this hope he confided his life to him, going back to the night when Samuel appeared to him, and recounting his father's business and character, introducing the different tutors that were chosen for him, and his own choice of Azariah, to whom he owed his knowledge of Greek. To all of which the philosopher listened complacently enough, merely asking if Azariah shared the belief prevalent in Galilee that the world was drawing to a close. On hearing that he did, he seemed to lose interest in Joseph's story of Azariah's relations to his neighbours, nor did he seem unduly afflicted at hearing that only the most orthodox views were acceptable in Galilee. His indifference was disheartening, but being now deep in his biography, Joseph related perforce the years he spent doing his father's business in northern Syria, hoping as he told his story to awaken the sage's interest in his visit to Jerusalem. The Sadducees did not believe that Jahveh had resolved to end the world and might be expected to appear in his chariot surrounded by angels blowing trumpets, bidding the dead to rise. But the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection—unfortunately including that of the corruptible body, which seemed to present many difficulties. He was about to enter on an examination of these difficulties, but the philosopher moved them aside contemptuously, and Joseph understood that he could not demean himself to the point of discussing the fallacies of the Pharisees, who, Joseph said, hope to stem the just anger of God on the last day by minute observances of the Sabbath. Mathias raised his eyes, and it was a revulsion of feeling, Joseph continued, against hypocrisy and fornication, that put me astride my mule as soon as I heard of the Essenes, the most enlightened sect of the Jews in Palestine. That you should be among them is testimony of their enlightenment.... Mathias raised his hand, and Joseph's face dropped into an expression of attention. Mathias was willing to accede that much, but certain circumlocutions in his language led Joseph to suspect that Mathias was not altogether satisfied with the Essenes. He seemed to think that they were too prone to place mere piety above philosophy: a mistake; for our intellect being the highest gift we have received from God, it follows that we shall please him best by using it assiduously. He spoke about the prayers before sunrise and asked Joseph if they did not seem to him somewhat trite and trivial and if he did not think that the moment would be more profitably spent by instituting a comparison between the light of the intellect and that of the sun?

Mathias turned to Joseph, and waited for him to confess his perplexities. But it was hard to confess to Mathias that philosophy was useless if the day of judgment were at hand! He dared not speak against philosophy and it was a long time before Mathias guessed his trouble, but as soon as it dawned on him that Joseph was in doubt as to the utility of philosophy, his face assumed so stern an expression that Joseph began to feel that Mathias looked upon him as a fool. It may have been that Joseph's consternation, so apparent on his face, restored Mathias into a kindly humour. Be that as it may, Mathias pointed out, and with less contempt than Joseph expected, that the day of judgment and philosophy had nothing in common. We should never cease to seek after wisdom, he said. Joseph concurred. It was not, however, pleasing to Joseph to hear prophecy spoken of as the outpourings of madmen, but—having in mind the contemptuous glance that would fall upon him if he dared to put prophecy above philosophy—he held his peace, venturing only to remark that no prophets were found in Judea for some hundreds of years. Except Manahem, he added hurriedly. But his remembrance of Manahem did not appease the philosopher, who dropped his eyes on Joseph and fixed them on him. The moment was one of agony for Joseph. And as if he remembered suddenly that Joseph was only just come into the district of the Jordan, Mathias told with some ironical laughter that the neighbourhood was full of prophets, as ignorant and as ugly as hyenas. They live, he said, in the caves along the western coasts of the Salt Lake, growling and snarling over the world, which they seem to think rotten and ready for them to devour. Or else they issue forth and entice the ignorant multitude into the Jordan, so that they may the more easily plunge them under the flood. But of what use to speak of these crazed folk, when there are so many subjects of which philosophy may gracefully treat?

Prophets in caves about the Salt Lake! Joseph muttered; and a great desire awakened in him to see them. But you're not going in search of these wretched men? Mathias asked, and his eyes filled with contempt, and Joseph felt that Mathias had already decided that all intellectual companionship was henceforth impossible between them. He was tempted to temporise. It was not to discuss the resurrection that he desired to see these men, but for curiosity; and during the long walk he would meditate on Mathias's doctrines.... Mathias did not answer him, and Joseph, seeing him cast away in philosophy and unable to advise him further, went to the president to ask for permission to absent himself for two days from the cenoby, a permission that was granted willingly when the object of the absence was duly related.

CHAP. VIII.

There was one John preaching in the country about the Jordan: the Baptist, they call him, the president said. But go, Joseph, and see the prophets for thyself. I shall be rare glad to hear what thou hast to say! And he pressed Joseph's hand, sending him off in good cheer. Banu, ask for Banu! were the last words he called after him, and Joseph hoped the ferryman would be able to point out the way to him. Oh yes, I know the prophet; the ferryman answered: a disciple of John, that all the people are following. But there be a bit of a walk before thee, and one that'll last thee till dawn, for Banu has been that bothered by visits these times, that he has gone up the desert out of the way, for he be preparing himself these whiles. For what? Joseph asked. The ferryman did not know; he told that John was not baptizing that morning, but for why he did not know. As like as not he be waiting for the river to lower, he said. At which Joseph had half a mind to leave Banu for John; but a passenger was calling the ferryman from the opposite bank and he was left with incomplete information and wandered on in doubt whether to return in quest of the Baptist or make the disciple his shift.

The way pointed out to him lay through the desert, and to find Banu's cave without guidance would not be easy, and after having found and interrogated him the way would seem longer to return than to come. But, having gone so far, he could not do else than attempt the hot weary search. And it will be one! he said, as he picked his way through the bushes and brambles that contrive to subsist somehow in the flat sandy waste lying at the head of the lake. But as he proceeded into the desert these signs of life vanished, and he came upon a region of craggy and intricate rocks rising sometimes into hills and sometimes breaking away and littering the plain with rubble. The desert is never completely desert for long, and on turning westward as he was directed, Joseph caught sight of the hill which he had been told to look out for—he could not miss it, for the evening sun lit up a high scarp, and on coming to the end of a third mile the desert began to look a little less desert, brambles began again. Banu could not be far away. But Joseph did not dare to go farther. He had been walking for many hours, and even if he were to meet Banu he could not speak to him, so closely did his tongue cleave to the sides of his mouth. But these brambles betoken water, he said; and on coming round a certain rock bulging uncouth from the hillside, he discovered a trickle, and a few paces distant, Banu, ugly as a hyena and more ridiculous than the animal, for—having no shirt to cover his nakedness—he had tressed a garland of leaves about his waist! Yet not so ugly at second sight as at first, for he sees God, Joseph said to himself; and he waited for Banu to rise from his knees.

Even hither do they pursue me, Banu's eyes seemed to say, while his fingers modestly rearranged his garland; and Joseph, who began to dread the hermit, begged to have the spring pointed out to him that he might drink. Banu pointed to it, and Joseph knelt and drank, and after drinking he was in better humour to tell Banu that Mathias, the great philosopher from Alexandria, scorned the prophecies that the end of the world could not be delayed much longer. And, as John is not baptizing these days, I thought I'd come and ask if we had better begin to prepare for the resurrection and the judgment. On hearing Joseph's reasons for his visit, the hermit stood with dilated eyes, as if about to speak. But he did not speak; and Joseph asked him what would become of the world after God destroyed it. Before answering, Banu stooped down, and having filled his hand with sand and gravel he said: God will fill his hand with earth, but not this time to make a man and woman, but out of each of his hands will come a full nation, and these he will put into full possession of the earth, for his chosen people will not repent....

But the ferryman told me that John gathered many together and was baptizing in Jordan? Joseph inquired. To which Banu answered naught, but stood looking at Joseph, who could scarce bring himself to look at Banu, though he felt himself to be in sore need of some prophetic confirmation of the date of the judgment. Is John the Messiah, come to preach that God is near and that we must repent in time? he asked; to which the hermit replied that the Messiah would have many fore-runners, and one of these would give his earthly life as a peace-offering, but enraged Jahveh would not accept it as sufficient and would return with the Messiah and destroy the world. I am waiting here till God bids me arise and preach to men, and the call will be soon, Banu said, for God's wrath is even now at its height. But do thou go hence to John, who has been called to the Jordan, and get baptism from him. But John is not baptizing these days, the river being in flood, Joseph cried after him. That flood will pass away, Banu answered, before the great and overwhelming flood arises. Will the world be destroyed by water? At this question Banu turned towards the hillside, like one that deemed his last exhortation to be enough, and who desired an undisturbed possession of the solitude. But at the entrance of the cave he stopped: the track is easy to lose after nightfall, he said, and panthers will be about in search of gazelles. Thou wouldst do well to remain with me: my cave is secure against wild beasts. Look behind thee: how dark are the rocks and hills! Joseph cast his eyes in the direction of Jericho and thanked God for having put a kind thought into the hermit's mind, for the landscape was gloomy enough already, and an hour hence he would be stumbling over a panther in the dark, and the sensation of teeth clutching at his throat and of hind claws tearing out his belly banished from his mind all thoughts of the unpleasantness of passing a night in a narrow cave with Banu, whom he helped to close the entrance with a big stone and to pile up other stones about the big stone making themselves safe, so Banu said, from everything except perhaps a bear.

The thought of the bear that might scrape aside the stone kept Joseph awake listening to Banu snoring, and to the jackals that barked all night long. They are quarrelling among themselves, Banu said, turning over, for the jackals succeeded in waking him, quarrelling over some gazelle they've caught. A moment after, he was asleep again, and Joseph, despite his fear of the wild beasts, must have dozed for a little while, for he started up, his hair on end. A bear! a bear! he cried, without awakening Banu, and he listened to a scratching and a sniffling round the stones with which they had blocked the entrance to the cave. Or a panther, he said to himself. The animal moved away, and then Joseph lay awake hour after hour, dropping to sleep and awakening again and again.

About an hour after sunrise, Banu awakened him and asked him to help him to roll the stones aside; which Joseph did, and as soon as they were in the dusk he turned out of his pockets a few crusts and some cheese made out of ewe's milk, and offered to share the food with his host; but Banu, pointing to a store of locusts, put some of the insects into his mouth and told Joseph that his vow was not to eat any other food till God called him forth to preach; which would be, he thought, a few days before the judgment: a view that Joseph did not try to combat, nor did he eat his bread and cheese before him, lest the sight of it should turn the prophet's stomach from the locusts. It was distressing to watch him chewing them; they were not easy to swallow, but he got them down at last with the aid of some water obtained from the source, and during breakfast his talk was all the while of the day of judgment and the anger of God, who would destroy Israel and build up another nation that would obey him. It would be three or four days before the judgment that God would call him out to preach, he repeated; and Joseph was waiting to hear how far distant were these days? A month, a year, belike some years, for God's patience is great. He stopped speaking suddenly, and throwing out his arms he cried out: he has come, he has come! He whom the world is waiting for. Baptize him! Baptize him! He whom the world is waiting for has come.

But for whom is the world waiting? Joseph asked; and Banu answered: hasten to the Jordan, and find him whom thou seekest.

CHAP. IX.

I shall pray that the Lord call thee out of the desert to join thy voice with those already preaching, Joseph cried; and the hermit answered him: let us praise the Lord for having sent us the new prophet! But do thou hasten to John, he called after Joseph, who ran and walked alternately, striving up every hillock for sight of the ferryman's boat which might well be waiting on this side for him to step on board; Joseph being in a hurry, it would certainly be lying under the opposite bank, the ferryman asleep in it, and so soundly that no cries would awaken him.

But Joseph's fortune was kinder than he anticipated, for on arriving at the Jordan he found himself at the very spot where the ferryman had tied his boat and—napping—awaited a passenger. So rousing him with a great shout, Joseph leaped on board and told the old fellow to pull his hardest; but having been pulling across the Jordan for nigh fifty years, the ferryman was little disposed to alter his stroke for the pleasure of the young man, who, he remembered, had not paid him over-liberally yester-evening; and in the mid-stream he rested on his oars, so that he might the better discern the great multitude gathered on yon bank. For baptism, he said; or making ready to go home after baptism, he added; and letting his boat drift, sat discoursing on the cold of the water, which he said was colder than he ever knew it before at this season of the year: remarks' that Joseph considered well enough in themselves, but out of his humour. So ye be craving for baptism, the ferryman said, and looked as if he did not care a wild fig whether Joseph got it that morning or missed it. But there was no use arguing with the ferryman, who after a long stare fell to his oars, but so leisurely that Joseph seized one of them and—putting his full strength upon it—turned the boat's head up-stream.

There be no landing up-stream anywhere, so loose my oars or I'll leave them to thee, the ferryman growled, and we shall be twirling about stream till midday and after. But I can row, Joseph said. Then row! and the ferryman put the other oar into his hand. But we shall be quicker across if thou'lt leave them to me. And as this seemed to Joseph the truth, he fell back into his seat, and did not get out of it till the boat touched the bank. But he jumped too soon and fell into the mud, causing much laughter along the bank, and not a few ribald remarks, some saying that he needed baptism more than those that had gotten it. But a hand was reached out to him, and that he should ask for the Baptist before thinking of his clothes showed the multitude that he must be another prophet, which he denied, calling on heaven to witness that he was not one: whereupon he was mistaken for a great sinner, and heard that however great his repentance it would avail him nothing, for the Baptist was gone away with his disciple. Joseph, thinking that he had left the Baptist's disciple in the desert, began to argue that this could not be, and raved incontinently at the man, bringing others round him, till he was hemmed into a circle of ridicule. Among the multitude many were of the same faith as Joseph himself, and these drew him out of the circle and explained to him that the Baptist baptized in the river for several hours, till—unable to bear the cold any longer—he had gone away, his teeth chattering, with Jesus the Essene.

Jesus the Essene! Joseph repeated, but before he could inquire further, men came running along the bank, saying they had sins to repent, and on hearing that the Baptist was gone and would not return that day, they began to tell each other stories of the great cloud that was seen in the east, bearing within it a chariot; and from the chariot angels were seen descending all the morning with flaming swords in their hands. Get thee baptized! they shouted, and clamoured, and pushed to and fro—a thronging gesticulating multitude of brown faces and hooked noses, of bony shoulders and striped shirts. Get thee baptized before sunset! everybody was crying. And Joseph watched the veils floating from their turbans as they fled southwards. On what errand? he asked; in search of the Baptist or the new disciple Jesus? Not the new disciple, was the answer he got back; for Jesus leaves baptism to John. But why doesn't Jesus baptize? Joseph asked, since he is a disciple of the Baptist. If baptism be good for him, it is good enough for another. And so the multitude seemed to think, and were confounded till one amongst them said that Jesus might not be endowed with the gift of baptism; or belike have accepted baptism from John for a purpose, it having been prophesied that the Messiah would have a forerunner. But who, asked many voices together, has said that Jesus is the Messiah? some maintaining that Jesus was the lesser prophet. But this contention was not agreeable to all, some having, for, reasons unknown to Joseph, ranged themselves already alongside of Jesus, believing him to be greater than John, yet not the final prophet promised to Israel. And these came to blows with the others, who looked upon John as the Messiah, and Jesus as the one whom John had called to his standard: a recruit—nothing. Skinny fists were striving in the air and—thrusting himself between two disputants—Joseph begged them to tell him if Jesus, John's disciple, was from the cenoby? Yea, yea, he heard from all sides; the shepherd of the brotherhood—that one who follows their flocks over the hills; but not being sure of his mission, he has gone into the desert to wait for a sign. An Essene, but one that was seldom in the cenoby, more often to be met on the hills with his flocks. A shepherd? Joseph asked. Yea, and it was among the hills that John met him, and seeing a prophet in him spoke to him, and Jesus, seeing that another prophet was risen up in Israel, had thrown his flute away and gone to the president to ask for leave to preach the baptism of repentance unto men, for the grand day is at hand. Joseph having heard this before, heeded only tidings of the new prophet, when a woman pressing forward shouted: a pleasant voice to hear on the mountain-side, said she; and another added: the hills will seem lonely without his gait. A great slinger, cried a third. But why did he come to John for baptism, knowing himself to be the greater prophet? A question that started them all wrangling again, and crying one against the other that repentance was necessary, or else the Lord would desert them or choose another race.

These are irksome gossips, a man said to Joseph; but come with me and I'll tell thee much about him. No better shepherd than he ever ranged the hills. I wouldn't have thee forget, mate, another man said, that he's gone without leaving us his great cure for scab. True for thee, mate, answered the first, for a great forgetfulness has been on him this time past.... A great cure, certainly, which he might have left us. And the twain fell to discussing their several cures for scab. Another shepherd came by and passed the remark that Jesus knew the hills like one born among them. But neither could tell whence he came, nor did they know if he brought the cure for scab with him, or learnt it at the cenoby. The brotherhood has secrets that it is forbidden to tell. I be with thee on this matter, said another shepherd, that wherever he goes, he'll be a prize to a master, for the schooling he has been through will stand to him.

The last of this chatter that came to Joseph's ears was that Jesus could do as much with sheep as any man since Abraham, and—satisfied with this knowledge—he took his leave of the shepherds, certain that Jesus must have been among the Essenes for many years before God called to him to leave his dogs and to follow John, whom he began to recognise as greater than himself, but whom he was destined to supersede, as John's own disciple, Banu, testified in the desert before Joseph's own eyes. He remembered how Banu saw John in a vision plunging Jesus into Jordan. Of trickery and cozenage there was none: for the men along these banks bore witness to the baptism that Joseph would have seen for himself if he had started a little earlier; nor could the Jesus who came to John for baptism be other than the young shepherd whom Joseph had seen, at the beginning of his novitiate, walking with the president in deep converse; the president apparently trying to dissuade him from some project. Joseph could not remember having heard anyone speak so familiarly or so authoritatively to the president, a man some twenty years older; and he wondered at the time how a mere shepherd from the hills could talk on an equality, as if they were friends, with the president. The shepherd, he now heard, was an Essene, but he lived among the hills, and Joseph remembered the striped shirt, the sheepskin and the long stride. His memory continued to unfold, and he recalled with singular distinctness and pleasure the fine broad brow curving upwards—a noble arch, he said to himself—the eyes distant as stars and the underlying sadness in his voice oftentimes soft and low, but with a cry in it; and he remembered how their eyes met, and it seemed to Joseph that he read in the shepherd's eyes a look of recognition and amity.

And now, as he walked from the Jordan to the cenoby, he remembered how, all one night after that meeting, dreams of a mutual destiny plagued him: how he slept and was awakened by visions that fled from his mind as he strove to recall them. But was this young shepherd the one that Banu saw John baptize in the Jordan? It cannot be else, he said to himself. But whither was Jesus gone? Did the brethren know, and if they did know would they tell him? It was against the rule to put questions: only the president could tell him, and he dared not go to the president. Yet consult somebody he must; and a few days afterwards he got leave again to visit Banu, whom he found lying in his cave, sick: not very sick; though having eaten nothing for nearly two days he begged Joseph to fetch him a little water from the rock; which Joseph did. After having drunk a little the hermit seemed to revive, and Joseph related how he missed Jesus on the bank and had no tidings of him except that he was gone into the desert to meditate. But the desert is large, and I know not which side of the lake he has chosen. To which Banu answered: John is baptizing in the Jordan; get thee baptized and repent! On which he reached out his hand to his store of locusts, and while munching a few he added: the Baptist is greater than Jesus, and he is still baptizing. Get thee to Jordan! At this Joseph took offence and returned to the cenoby with the intention of resuming his teaching. But he was again so possessed of Jesus that he could not keep his mind on the lesson before him: a pupil was often forced to put a question to him in a loud voice, and perhaps to repeat it, before Joseph's sick reverie was sufficiently broken for him to formulate an answer. The pain of the effort to return to them was so apparent in his face that the pupils began to be sorry for him and kept up a fire of questions, to save him from the melancholy abstractions to which he lately seemed to have become liable. The cause of his grief they could not guess, but he was not sure they did not suspect the cause; and so the classes in which he heretofore took so much pleasure came to be dreaded by him. Every moment except those in which he sat immersed in dreams was a penance and a pain; and at last he pleaded illness, and Mathias took his class, leaving Joseph to wander as far as he liked from the cenoby, which had become hateful to him.

He was often met in the public gardens in Jericho, watching the people going by, vaguely interested and vaguely wearied by the thoughts that their different shows called up in his mind; and he was always painfully conscious that nothing mattered: that the great void would never be filled up again: and that time would not restore to him a single desire or hope. Nothing matters, he often said to himself, as he sat drawing patterns in the gravel with his stick. Yet he had no will to die, only to believe he was the victim of some powerful malign influence.

One day as he sat watching the wind in the palm-trees, it seemed to him that this influence, this demon, was always moving behind his life, disturbing and setting himself to destroy any project that Joseph might form. Another day it seemed to Joseph that the demon cast a net over him, and that—entangled in the meshes—he was being drawn—Somebody spoke to him, and he awoke so affrighted that the gossip could hardly keep himself from laughing outright. If the end of the world were at hand, let the end come to pass! he said; but he did not go to John for baptism. He knew not why, only that he could not rouse himself! And it was not till it came to be rumoured in Jericho that a prophet was gone to Egypt to learn Greek that he awoke sufficiently to ask why a Jewish prophet needed Greek. The answer he got was that the new doctrine required a knowledge of Greek; Greek being a world-wide language, and the doctrine being also world-wide. As there was but one God for all the world, it was reasonable to suppose that every man might hope for salvation, be he Jew or Gentile. It seemed to Joseph that this doctrine could only emanate from the young shepherd he had met in the cenoby, and he joined a caravan, and for fifteen days dreamed of the meeting that awaited him at the end of the journey—and of the delightful instruction in Greek that he was going to impart to Jesus. The heights of Mount Sinai turned his thoughts backward only for a moment, and he continued his dream of Jesus, continuing without interruption along the shell-strewn shores of the Sea of Arabah, on and on into the peninsula, till he stepped from the lurching camel into the great caravanserai in Alexandria.

Without exactly expecting to find Jesus waiting for him in the street, he had dreamed of meeting him somewhere in the city. He was sure he would recognise that lean face, lit with brilliant eyes, in any crowd, and the thought of getting news of Jesus in the synagogues in some sort drowsed in his mind. As Jesus did not happen to be waiting outside the caravanserai, Joseph sought him from synagogue to synagogue, without getting tidings of him but of another, for the camel-drivers at Mount Sinai had not informed him wrongly: a young Jew had passed through the city on his way to Athens, but as he did not correspond to Joseph's remembrances of Jesus, Joseph did not deem it to be worth his while to follow this Jew to Athens. He remained in Alexandria without forming any resolutions, seeking Jesus occasionally in the Jewish quarters; and when they were all searched he returned to the synagogues once more and began a fresh inquisition, but very soon he began to see that the faces about him were overspread with incredulous looks and smiles, especially when he related that his friend was the young prophet discovered by John among the hills of Judea, tending sheep.

What tale is this that he tells us? the Jews asked apart; but finding Joseph well instructed and of agreeable presence and manner, they made much of him. If Galilee could produce such a man as Joseph, Galilee was going up in the world. We will receive thee and gladly, but speak no more to us of thy shepherd prophet, and betake thyself to our schools of philosophy, which thou'lt enjoy, for thy Greek is excellent. But who taught thee Greek? And while Joseph was telling of Azariah, little smiles played about his eyes and mouth, for the incredulity of the Alexandrian Jews had begotten incredulity in him, and he began to see how much absurdity his adventure made show for. The Alexandrian Jews liked him better for submitting himself so cheerfully to their learning and their ideas, and he became a conspicuous and interesting person, without knowledge that he was becoming one. Nor was it till having moulded himself, or been moulded, into a new shape that he began to think that he might have done better if he had left the moulding to God. His conscience told him this and reminded him how he vowed himself to Jesus, whom Banu saw in a vision. All the same he remained, not unnaturally, a young man enticed by the charm of the Greek language, and the science of the Alexandrian philosophers, who were every one possessed of Mathias's skill in dialectics. They all knew Mathias and were imbued with much respect for him as a teacher, and were willing to instruct Joseph in psychology, taking up the lesson where Mathias closed the book. So, putting his conscience behind him, Joseph listened, his ears wide open and his mind alert to understand that it was a child's story—the report in Jerusalem that the end of the world was approaching, and that God would remould it afresh—as if God were human like ourselves, animated with like business and desires! He heard for the first time that to arrive at any clear notion of divinity we must begin by stripping divinity of all human attributes, and when every one is sloughed, what remains? Divinity, Joseph answered; and his instructor bowed his head, saying: here is no matter for reflection.

The philosophers were surprised to learn that in Jerusalem many still retained the belief that God was no more than a man of colossal stature, angry, revengeful, and desirous of burnt offerings and of prayers which were little better; that the corruptible body could be raised from the dead and given back to the soul for a dwelling. That Jerusalem had fallen so low in intellect was not known to them; and Joseph, feeling he was making a noise in the world, admitted that despite the knowledge of the Greek language he accepted the theory that the soul was created before the body and waited in a sort of dim hall, hanging like a bat, for the creation of the body which it was predestined to descend into, till the death of the body released it. He was, however, now willing to believe that the souls of all the wise men mentioned in the books of Moses were sent down to earth as to a colony; great souls could not abide like bats in the darkness, but are ever desirous of contemplation and learning. And on pursuing this thought in the Greek language, which lends itself to subtle shades of thought, he discovered that there are three zones: the first zone is reason, the second passion and the third appetite. And this his first psychological discovery was approved by his teacher, and many months were passed over in agreeable exercises of the mind of like nature, interrupted only by letters from his father, asking him when he proposed to return home.

After reading one of these letters, his unhappiness lasted sometimes for a whole day, and it was revived many times during the week; but philosophy enabled him to resist the voice of conscience still a little while, and even a letter relating the death of his grandmother did not decide his departure. It seemed at first to have decided him, and he told all his friends that he was leaving with the next caravan. But of what use, he asked himself, for me to return to Galilee? Granny is in her grave: could I bring her back to life I would return! So he remained in Egypt for some time longer, and what enforced his return were the long plains, in which oxen drew the plough from morning till evening; and he had begun to long for clouds and for the hills, and the desire to escape from the plain grew stronger every day till at last he could not do else than yield to it. By the next caravan, he said to himself.

In Egypt he had met no prophet, only philosophers, and becoming once more obsessed by miracles, he hastened to Banu, but of Jesus Banu could only tell him that he was doing the work that our Father had given him to do. Which is more than thou art doing. Go and get baptism from John! Go back to Jericho and wait for a sign, leaving me in peace, for I need it, having been troubled by many, eager and anxious about things that do not matter. I will indeed, Joseph replied, for nothing matters to me since I cannot find him. And he returned to Jericho, saying to himself that Jesus must be known to every shepherd; perhaps to that one, he said, running to head back his flock, which has been tempted by a patch of young corn; Joseph stood at gaze, for the shepherd wore the same garb as Jesus had done: a turban fixed on the head with two tiring-rings of camel's hair, with veils floating from the shoulders to save the neck from the sun. Jesus, too, wore a striped shirt, and over it was buckled a dressed sheepskin; and Joseph pondered on the shepherd's shoon, on his leathern water-bottle, on his long slender fingers twitching the thongs of the sling. He had been told that no better slinger had been known in these hills than Jesus. But he had left the hills and had gone, whither none could tell! He was gone, whither no man knew, not even Banu. He is about his Father's work, was all Banu could say; and Joseph wandered on from shepherd to shepherd, questioning them all, and when none was in sight he cried again Jesus's name to the winds, and never passed a cave without looking into it, though he had lost hope of finding him. But he continued his search, for it whiled the time away, though it did nothing else, and one day as he lay under a rock, watching a shepherd passing across the opposite hillside, he tried to summon courage to call him; but judging him to be one of those whom he had already asked for tidings of Jesus, he let him go, and fell to thinking of the look that would come into the shepherd's face on hearing the same question put to him again. A poor demented man! he would mutter to himself as he went away. Nor was Joseph sure that his mind was not estranged from him. He could no longer fix it upon anything: it wandered as incontinently as the wind among the hills, and very often he seemed to have come back to himself after a long absence, but without any memory. Yet he must have been thinking of something; and he was trying to recall his thoughts, when the shepherd came back into view again and Joseph remarked to himself that he was without a flock. He seemed to be seeking something, for from a sheer edge he peered down into the valley. A ewe that has fallen over, no doubt, Joseph thought; but what concern of mine is that shepherd who has lost a ewe, and whether he will find his ewe or will fail to find it? Of no concern whatever, he said to himself, and—forgetful of the shepherd—he began to watch the evening gathering in the sky. Very soon, he said, the hills will be folded in a dim blue veil, and sleep will perchance blot out the misery that has brooded in me all this livelong day, he muttered. May I never see another, but close my eyes for ever on the broad ruthless light. Of what avail to witness another day? All days are alike to me.

It seemed to Joseph that he was of a sort dead already, for he could detach himself from himself, and consider himself as indifferently as he might a blade of grass. My life, he said, is like these bare hills, and the one thing left for me to desire is death.

A footstep aroused him from his dream. The man whom he had seen on the hillside yonder had crossed the valley, and he began to describe the animals he had lost, before Joseph recovered from his reverie. No, he said, I have seen no camels. Camels might have passed him by without his seeing them, but there was no obligation on him to confide his misery to the shepherd, a rough, bearded man in a sheepskin, who thanked him and was about to go, when Joseph called after him: if you want help to seek your camels, I'll come with you. Even the company of this man were better than his loneliness; and together they crossed some hills. Why, there be my camels, as I'm alive! the camel-driver cried. Joseph had brought him luck, for in a valley close at hand the camels were found, staring into emptiness. Strange abstractions! Joseph said to himself, and then to the camel-driver: since I have found your camels, who knows but that you may tell me of one Jesus, an Essene from the cenoby on the eastern bank of the Jordan? A shepherd of these hills? the man asked, and Joseph replied: yes, indeed. To which the camel-driver answered: if I hear of him, I'll send him a message that you are looking for him, and I'll send you word that he has been found. But you'll never find him, Joseph answered. You didn't think you would find my camels, the driver replied; but so it fell out, and if I could only find a few more camels, or the money to buy them, I could lay down a great trade in figs between Jericho and Jerusalem; he related simply, not knowing that the man he was talking to could give him all the money he required; telling that figs ripen earlier in Jericho, especially if the trees have the advantage of high rocks behind them.

It pleased Joseph to listen to his patter: it seemed to him that his father was talking to him, and he was plunged in such misery that he had to extricate himself somehow. So he signed the deed that evening, and within a month a caravan laden with figs went forth and wended its way safely to Jerusalem. Another caravan followed a few weeks after, and still larger profits were made, and these becoming known to certain thieves, the next caravan was waylaid and driven away to the coast, and the figs shipped to some foreign part or sold to unscrupulous dealers, who knew them to be stolen. The loss was so great that Gaddi said to Joseph: if we lose a second caravan we shall be worse off than we were when we began, and we shall lose a third and a fourth, unless the robbers be driven out of their caves. Let us then go to the Roman governor, Pilate, and lay our case before him. Joseph had no fault to find with Gaddi's words, and he said: it may be that I shall go to Pilate myself, for I am known to him through my father, who trades largely between Tiberias and Antioch with salt fish.

It so happened that Pilate had received instructions from Rome to give every protection to trade, it being hoped thereby to win the Jews from religious disputations, which always ended in riots. Pilate therefore now found the occasion he needed. Joseph had brought it to him, for the ridding of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho would evince his ability as administrator; and with his hand in his beard, his fine eyes bent favourably upon Joseph, he promised that all the forces of the Roman Empire would be employed to smoke out these nests of robbers. From the account given by Joseph of the caves, he did not deem it worth while to send soldiers groping through the darkness of rocks; he was of opinion that bundles of damp straw would serve the purpose admirably; and turning to the captain of the guard he appealed to him, and got for answer that a few trusses of damp straw would send forth such a reek that all within the cave would be choked, or reel out half blinded.

Joseph reminded Pilate and the captain of the guard that the openings of the caves were not always accessible, but abutted over a ledge away down a precipitous cliff. It might be necessary to lower soldiers down in baskets, or the caves might be closed with mortised stones. Joseph's counsel was wise; the closing of the caves proved very efficacious in ridding the hills of robbers, though in some cases the robbers managed to pick a way out, and then sought other caves, which were not difficult to find, the hills abounding in such places of hiding. A cave would sometimes have two outlets, and it was hard to get the shepherds to betray the robbers, their fear of them was so great. But within six months the larger dens were betrayed, and while the robbers writhed the last hours of their lives away on crosses, long trains of camels and asses pursued their way from Jericho to Jerusalem and back again, without fear of molestation, the remnant of robbers never daring to do more than draw away a single camel or ass found astray from the encampment.

The result of all this labour was that figs were no longer scarce in Jerusalem; and when a delay in bringing wheat from Moab was announced to Pilate, he sent a messenger to Joseph, it having struck him that the transport service so admirably organised by them both was capable of development. A hundred camels, Joseph answered, needs a great sum, but perhaps Gaddi, my partner, may have some savings or my father may give me the money.

And with Pilate's eyes full upon him, Joseph sat thinking of the lake, recalling every bight and promontory, and asking himself how it was that he had not thought of Galilee for so long a time. He longed to set eyes on Magdala, and he would have ridden away at once, but an escort would have to be ordered, for a single horseman could not ride through Samaria without a certainty of being robbed before he got to the end of his journey. Pilate's voice roused Joseph from his reverie, and after apologising to the Roman magistrate for his absentmindedness, he went away to consult hurriedly with Gaddi, and then to make preparations for the journey. It was a journey of three days on horseback, he was told, but of two days only on camel-back, for a camel can walk three miles an hour for eighteen hours. But what should I be doing on a camel's back for eighteen hours? Joseph cried, and the driver showed Joseph how with his legs strapped on either side of the beast he could lie back in the pack and sleep away many hours. Your head, sir, would soon get accustomed to the rocking. But I should have to leave my horse behind, Joseph said. He was fain to see his father and the lake; he was already there in spirit, and would like to transport his cumbersome body there in the least possible time; but he could not separate himself from Xerxes, a beautiful horse that he had brought with him from Egypt—a dark grey—a sagacious animal that would neigh at the sound of his voice and follow him like a dog, and when they encamped for the night, wander in search of herbage and come back when he was called, or wait for him like a wooden horse at an inn door.

Horse and horseman seemed a match the morning they went away to Galilee together, Xerxes all bits and bridles, stirrups and trappings, and Joseph equipped for the journey not less elaborately than his horse. He wore a striped shirt and an embroidered vest with two veils falling from his turban over his shoulders, and as he was not going to visit the Essenes, he did not forget to provide himself with weapons: a curved scimitar hung by his side and the jewelled hilt of a dagger showed above his girdle. His escort not having arrived yet, he waited; taking pleasure in the arch of Xerxes' neck when the horse turned his head towards him, and in the dark courageous eyes and the beautifully turned hoof that pawed the earth so prettily. At last the five spearmen and their captain appeared, and Xerxes, who seemed to recognise the escort as a sign for departure, presented his left side for Joseph to mount him. As soon as his master was in the saddle, he shook his accoutrements and sprang forward at the head of the cavalcade, Joseph crying back: he must have the sound of hoofs behind him. He could refuse his horse nothing, and suffered him to canter some few hundred yards up the road, though it was not customary to leave the escort behind, and when Joseph returned, the foreman told him, as he expected he would, that it would be well not to tire his horse by galloping him at the beginning of the journey, for a matter of thirty miles lay in front of them. Thirty miles the first day, he said, and fifty the second day; for by this division he would leave twenty-five miles for the third day; and Joseph learnt that the captain had arranged the journey in this wise for the sake of the inns, for though they would meet an inn every twenty miles, there were but three good inns between Jerusalem and Tiberias. He had arranged too with a view to the rest at midday. Our way lies, he said, through the large shallow valley, and that is why I started at six. It is about four hours hence, so we shall be through it well before noon. But why must we pass through it before noon? Joseph asked. Because, the captain answered, the rocks on either side are heated after noon like the walls of an oven, and man and beast choke in it. But once we get out of the valley, we shall have pleasant country. You know the hills, Sir; and Joseph remembered the rounded hills and Azariah's condemnation of the felling of the forests, a condemnation that the captain agreed with; for though it was true that the woods afforded cover for wolves, still it was not wise to fell the trees; for when the woods go, the captain said, the country will lose its fertility. He was a loquacious fellow, knowing the country well, wherefore pleasant to ride alongside of, and the hours passed quickly, hearing him relate his life. And when after two days' riding Joseph wearied of his foreman's many various relations, his eyes admired the slopes, now greener than they would be again till another year passed. The fig-trees were sending out shoots, the vines were in little leaf, and the fragrance of the vineyards and fig gardens was sweet in the cool morning when the dusk melted away and rose-coloured clouds appeared above the hills; and as Joseph rode he liked to think that the spectacle of the cavalcade faring through the vine-clad hills would abide in his memory, and that in years to come he would be able to recall it exactly as he now saw it—all the faces of the spearmen and their odd horses; even his foreman's discourses would become a pleasure to remember when time would redeem them of triteness and commonplace; the very weariness he now experienced in listening to them would, too, become a perennial source of secret amusement to him later on. But for the moment he could not withstand his foreman a moment longer, and made no answer when he came interrupting his meditations with tiresome learning regarding the great acacia-tree into whose shade Joseph had withdrawn himself. He was content to enjoy the shade and the beauty of the kindly tree that flourished among rocks where no one would expect a tree to flourish, and did not need to be told that the roots of a tree seek water instinctively, and that the roots of the acacia seek water and find it, about three feet down. The acacia gave the captain an opportunity to testify of his knowledge, and Joseph remembered suddenly that he would be returning to Jerusalem with him in three days, for not more than three days would his escort remain in Galilee, resting their horses, unless they were paid a large sum of money; and with that escort idle in the village the thought would never be out of his mind that in a few days he would be listening to his foreman all the way back to Jerusalem.

Impossible! He couldn't go back to Jerusalem in three days, nor in three weeks. His father would be mortally grieved if he did; and Pilate himself would be surprised to see him back so soon and think him lacking altogether in filial affection if, after an absence of more than two years, he could stay only three days with his father. He must, however, send a letter to Pilate and one that consisted with all the circumstances. The barely stirring foliage of the acacia inspired a desire of composition: a more favourable moment than the present, or a more inspiring spot, he did not think he would be likely to find. He called for his tablets and fell to thinking, but hardly filled in the first dozen lines when his foreman—this time apologising for the intrusion—came to tell him that if he wished to reach Magdala that evening they must start at once. He could not but acquiesce, and—as if contemptuous of the protection of his escort—he rode on in front, wishing to be left alone so that he might seek out the terms of his letter, and his mood of irritated perplexity did not pass away till he came within sight of the great upland, rising, however, so gently that he did not think Xerxes would mind ascending it at a gallop. As soon as he reached the last crest, he would see the lake alone, having—thanks to the speed of Xerxes—escaped from his companions for at least five minutes. He looked forward to these moments eagerly yet not altogether absolved from apprehension of a spiritual kind, for the lake always seemed to him a sort of sign, symbol or hieroglyphic, in which he read a warning addressed specially, if not wholly, to himself. The meaning that the lake held out to him always eluded him, and never more completely than now, at the end of an almost windless spring evening.

It came into view a moment sooner than he thought for, and in an altogether different aspect—bluer than ever seen by him in memory or reality—and, he confessed to himself, more beautiful. Like a great harp it lay below him, and his eyes followed the coast-lines widening out in an indenture of the hills: on one side desert, on the other richly cultivated ascents, with villages and one great city, Tiberias—its domes, cupolas, towers and the high cliffs abutting the lake between Tiberias and Magdala bathed in a purple glow as the sun went down. My own village! he said, and it was a pleasure to him to imagine his father sipping sherbet on his balcony, in good humour, no doubt, the weather being so favourable to fish-taking. Now which are Peter's boats among these? he asked himself, his eyes returning to the fishing fleet. And which are John's and James's boats? He could tell that all the nets were down by the reefed sails crossed over, for the boats were before the wind. A long pull back it will be to Capernaum, he was thinking, a matter of thirteen or fourteen miles, for the leading boat is not more than a mile from the mouth of the Jordan. Then, raising his eyes from the fishing-boats, he followed the coast-lines again, seeking the shapes of the wooded hills, rising in gently cadenced ascents.

A more limpid evening never breathed upon a lake! he said; and when he raised his eyes a second time they rested on the ravines of Hermon far away in the north, still full of the winter's snow; and—being a Galilean—he knew they would keep their snow for another month at least. The eagerness of the spring would then be well out of the air; and I shall be thinking, he continued, of returning to Jerusalem and concerning myself once more with Pilate's business. But what a beautiful evening! still and pure as a crystal.

A bird floated past, his black eyes always watchful. The bird turned away to join his mates, and Joseph bade his escort watch the flock: a bird here and a bird there swooping and missing and getting no doubt sometimes a fish that had ventured too near the surface—that one leaving his mates, flying high towards Magdala, to be there, he said, in a few minutes, by my father's house; and in another hour thou shalt be in thy stable, thy muzzle in the corn, he whispered into his horse's ear; and calling upon his comrades to put their heels into their tired steeds, he turned Xerxes into the great road leading to Tiberias.

But there were some Jews among the escort who shrank from entering a pagan city. Their prejudices might be overcome with argument, but it were simpler to turn their horses' heads to the west and then to the north as soon as the city was passed. The detour would be a long one, but it were shorter than argument: yet argument he did not escape from, for as they rode through the open country behind Tiberias, some declared that Herod was not a pure Jew; and to make their points clearer they often reined up their horses, to the annoyance of Joseph, who could not bring the discussion to an end without seeming indifferent to the law and the traditions. But, happily, it had to end before long, for within three miles of Magdala they were riding in single file down deep lanes along whose low dykes the cactus crawled, hooking itself along. One lane led into another. A network of deep lanes wound round Magdala, which, judging by the number of new dwellings, seemed to have prospered since Joseph had last seen it. Humble dwellings no doubt, Joseph said to himself, but bread is not lacking, nor fish. Then he thought of the wharves his father had built for the boats, and the workshops for the making of the barrels into which the fish was packed. Magdala owed its existence to Dan's forethought, and he had earned his right, Joseph thought, to live in the tall house which he had built for his pleasure in a garden amid tall acacia-trees that every breeze that blew up from the lake set in motion.

If ever a man, Joseph thought, earned his right to a peaceable old age amid pleasant surroundings, that man was his father; and he thought of him returning from his counting-house to his spacious verandah, thinking of the barrels of salt fish that he would send away the following week, if the fishers were letting down their nets with fortunate enterprise.

CHAP. X.

A very good guessing of his father's wonts and thoughts was that of Joseph while riding from Tiberias, for as the horsemen came up the lane at a canter the old man was wending homeward from his counting-house, wishing Peter and Andrew, James and John and the rest good fortune with their nets, or else, he had begun to think, the order from Damascus cannot——- The completed sentence would probably have run: cannot be executed, but the sound of the hooves of Joseph's horse checked the words on his lips and he had to squeeze himself against the ditch, to escape being trodden upon. Joseph sprang from the saddle. Father, I haven't hurt you, I hope? I was dreaming. Why, Joseph, it is you! You haven't hurt me, and I was dreaming too. But what a beautiful horse you are riding! Aren't you afraid he will run away? Up and down these lanes he would give us a fine chase. No, Joseph replied, he'll follow me. And the horse followed them, pushing his head against Joseph's shoulder from time to time; but Joseph was too much engaged with his father to do more than whistle to Xerxes when he lingered to browse.

As we rode past Tiberias, I had imagined you, Father, sitting in the verandah drinking sherbet. We will have some presently, Dan answered. I was detained at my business. Tell me, Father, how are the monkeys and the parrots? Much the same as you left them, Dan answered, as he laid his hand on the latch of the large wooden gate. A servant came forward to conduct them, and Joseph threw his reins to him.

A monkey came hopping across the sward and jumped on to Joseph's shoulder. Another came, and then a third. Dan would have been annoyed if the monkeys had not recognised Joseph, for it seemed to him quite natural that all things should love Joseph. You see, he continued, the parrots are screaming and dancing on their perches, waiting for you to scratch their polls. Joseph complied, and then Dan wearied of the monkeys, which were absorbing Joseph's attention, and drove them away. You haven't told me that you're glad to be back in Galilee in front of that beautiful lake. Jerusalem has its temple but God made the lake himself. But you don't seem as pleased to be back as I'd like. Father, it is of thee I'm thinking and not of temples or lakes, Joseph answered, and for a moment Dan could not speak, so deep was his happiness, and so intense. Overcome by it, they walked a little way and Joseph followed his father up the tall stairs on to the verandahed balcony, and when they had drunk some sherbet and Joseph had vowed he had not tasted any like it, Dan interposed suddenly: but thou hast not told me, Joseph, how thou camest by thy beautiful horse. He came from Egypt, Joseph answered casually, and was about to add that he was an Egyptian horse, but on second thoughts it seemed to him that it would be well not to speak the word "Egypt" again: to do so might put another question into his father's mouth; he would not commit himself to a rank lie, and to tell that he had gone to Egypt could not do else than lead him into an intricate story which would indispose his father to listen to Pilate's projects, or at least estrange Dan's mind from a calm judgment of them; so he resolved to omit all mention of Banu, Jesus and Egypt and to begin his narrative with an account of his meeting with the camel-driver Gaddi. But the camel-driver seemed to be the last person that Dan was interested in. But he's my partner! Joseph exclaimed, and it was he who sent me to Pilate. I'll tell thee about the Essenes afterwards. And feeling that he had at last succeeded in fixing his father's attention on that part of the story which he wished to tell him, Joseph said: an excellent governor, one who is ready to listen to all schemes for the furtherance of commercial enterprise in Judea: he has ridded the hills of the robbers; and his account of the summer in the desert with the Roman soldiers, smoking out nest after nest and putting on crosses those that were taken alive interested the old man. I wish he would start on Samaria, Dan mentioned casually; and Joseph replied, and he will as soon as he is certain that he can rely on the help of men like thee. Pilate's favour is worth winning, Father, and it can be won. I doubt thee not, but wilt tell how it may be won, my boy? By falling in with his projects, Joseph answered, and began his relation. And when he had finished, Dan sat meditating, casting up the account: Pilate's good will is desirable, he said, but a large sum of money will have to be advanced. But, Father, the carrying trade has been a great success. Well, let us go into figures, Joseph. And they balanced the profits against the losses. Without doubt thou hast done well this last half year, Dan said, and if business don't fall away—— But, Father, Joseph interrupted, think of the profit my account would have shown if we had not lost two convoys. The loss has already been very nearly paid off. There are no more robbers and the demand for figs is steady in Jerusalem. Figs ripen much earlier—— Say no more, Joseph. My money is thy money, and if fifty camels be wanted, thou shalt have them. 'Tis the least I can do for thee, for thou hast ever been a frugal son, Joseph, and art deserving of all I have. So Pilate has heard of my fish-salting and maybe that was why he met thee on such fair terms. That has much to do with it, Joseph replied, and he watched the look of satisfaction that came into his father's face. But tell me, Joseph, has all this long time been spent smoking out robbers? Tell me again of their caves. Well, Father, the caves often opened on to ledges, and we had to lower the soldiers in baskets.

And the tale how one great cavern was besieged amused the old man till he was nigh to clapping his hands with delight and to reminding Joseph of the time when he used to ask his grandmother to tell him stories. Were she here she'd like to hear thee telling thy stories. Thou wast in her thoughts to the last and now we shall never see her any more, however great our trouble may be; and in the midst of a great silence they fell to thinking how the same black curtain would drop between them and the world. She has gone away to Arimathea, Joseph, whence we came and whither I shall follow her. We go forward a little way but to go back again. But I can't talk of deaths and graves. Go on telling me about Pilate and the robbers, for I've been busy all day in the counting-house adding up figures, and to listen to a good tale is a rare distraction. Yet I wouldn't talk of them either, Joseph, but of thyself and thy horse that all the country will be talking about the day after to-morrow, when thou'lt ride him into the town. And now say it, Joseph: ye are a wee bit tired, isn't that so? Nay, Father, not a bit. We have come but twenty miles from the last halt, and as for the telling of my story, maybe the loose ends which I've forgotten for the moment will unravel themselves while we're talking of fish-salting—of the many extra barrels you've sent out. Now, Father, say how many? At it, Joseph, as beforetimes, rallying thy old father! Well, I've not done so badly, but a drop in the year's trading is never a pleasant thought, though it be but a barrel. And he began again his complaint against the government of Antipas, who had never encouraged trade as he should have done. Now, if we had a man here such as thy friend Pilate, I'd not be saying too much were I to say that my trade could be doubled. But Pilate has no authority in Galilee. Joseph thought that Pilate's authority should be extended. But how can that be done? Dan inquired, and being embarrassed for an answer, Joseph pressed Dan to confide in him, a thing which Dan showed no wish to do; but at last his reluctance was overcome, and shyly he admitted that his despondency had nothing to do with Antipas nor with a casual drop in the order from Damascus, but with a prophet that was troubling the neighbourhood. A very dangerous prophet, too, is this one; but I am afraid, Joseph, we don't view prophets in exactly the same light. Joseph was about to laugh, but seeing the smile coming into his eyes, his father begged him to wait till he heard the whole story.

He called up all his attention into his face, and the story he heard was that the new prophet, who came up from Jordan about a year ago, was preaching that the Lord was so outraged at the conduct of his chosen people that he had determined to destroy the world, and might begin the wrecking of it any day of the week. But before the world ends there'll be wars. Joseph said: but there has been none, nor have I heard rumours of any. We don't hear much what's going on up here in Galilee, Dan answered, and he continued his story: the new prophet had persuaded many of the fishers to lay down their nets. Simon Peter, thou rememberest him? Well, he's the prophet's right-hand man, and now casts a net but seldom. And thou hast not forgotten James and John, sons of Zebedee? They come next in the prophet's favour, and there are plenty of others walking about the village, neglecting their work and telling of the judgment and the great share of the world that'll come to them when the prophet returns from heaven in a chariot. Among them is Matthew, a publican, the only one that can read or write. You don't remember him? Now I come to think on it, he was appointed soon after thou wentest to Jerusalem. Soon after I went to Jerusalem? Joseph asked; was the prophet preaching then? No. It all began soon after thy departure for Jerusalem about a year ago; a more ignorant lot of fellows thou'st be puzzled to find, if thou wert to travel the world over in search of them. The prophet himself comes from the most ignorant village in Galilee—Nazareth. But why look like that, Joseph? What ails thee? Go on, Father, with thy telling of the prophet from Nazareth. He started in Nazareth, Dan answered, but none paid any heed to him but made a mock of him, for he'd have us believe that he is the Messiah that the Jews have been expecting for many a year. But it was predicted that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem; and everybody knows that Jesus was born in Nazareth. There's some talk, too, that he comes from the line of David, but everybody knows that Jesus is the son of Joseph the Carpenter. His mother and his brothers tried all they could do to dissuade him from preaching about the judgment, which he knows no more about than the next one, but he wouldn't listen to them. A good quiet woman, his mother; I know her well and am sorry for her; but she has better sons in James and Jude. Joseph her husband, I knew him in days gone by—a God-fearing honest man, whom one could always entrust with a day's work. He doted on his eldest son, though he never could teach him to handle a saw with any skill, for his thoughts were always wandering, and when an Essene came up to Galilee in search of neophytes, Jesus took his fancy and they went away together. But what ails thee? As soon as Joseph could get control of his voice, he asked his father if the twain were gone away together to the cenoby on the eastern bank of Jordan, and Dan answered that he thought he had heard of the great Essenes' encampment by the Dead Sea. A fellow fair-spoken enough, Dan continued, that has bewitched the poor folk about the lakeside. But, Joseph, thy cheek is like ashes, and thou'rt all of a tremble: drink a little sherbet, my boy. No, Father, no. Tell me, is the Galilean as tall or as heavy as I am, or of slight build, with a forehead broad and high? And does he walk as if he were away and in communion with his Father in heaven? But what ails thee, my son? What ails thee? He came from the cenoby on the eastern shores of the Jordan? Joseph continued; and has been here nearly two years? He received baptism from John in the Jordan? Isn't that so, Father? I know naught of his baptism, Dan answered, but he'll fall into trouble. I was with Banu, Joseph said, when the hermit saw him in a vision receiving baptism from John; but though I ran, I was too late, and ever since have sought Jesus, in Egypt and afterwards among the hills of Judea. I can't tell thee more at present, but would go out into the garden or perhaps wander by myself for a little while under the cliffs by the lake. Thou'lt forgive me this sudden absence, Father?

Dan put down his glass of sherbet and looked after his son. He had been so happy for a little while, and now unhappiness was by again.

CHAP. XI.

The dogs barked as he unlocked the gate, but a few words quieted them (they still remembered his voice) and he crept upstairs to his room, weary in body and sore of foot, for he had come a long way, having accompanied Jesus, whom he had met under the cliffs abutting the lake, to the little pathway cut in the shoulder of the hill that leads to Capernaum. He had not recognised him as he passed, which was not strange, so unseemly were the ragged shirt and the cloak of camel's or goat's hair he wore over it, patched along and across, one long tatter hanging on a loose thread. It caught in his feet, and perforce he hitched it up as he walked, and Joseph remembered that he looked upon the passenger as a mendicant wonder-worker on his round from village to village. But Jesus had not gone very far when Joseph was stopped by a memory of a face seen long ago: a pale bony olive face, lit with brilliant eyes. It is he! he cried; and starting in pursuit and quickly overtaking Jesus, he called his name. Jesus turned, and there was no doubt when the men stood face to face that the shepherd Joseph had seen in the cenoby in converse with the president, and the wandering beggar by the lake shore, were one and the same person. Jesus asked him which way he was walking, and he answered that all directions were the same to him, for he was only come out for a breath of fresh air before bed-time. But thinking he had expressed himself vulgarly, he added other words and waited for Jesus to speak of the beauty of God's handiwork. Jesus merely mentioned in answer that he was going to Capernaum, where he lodged with Simon Peter. But he had not forgotten the brotherhood by the Dead Sea, and invited Joseph to accompany him and tell him of those whom he had left behind. We are of the same brotherhood, he said; and then, as if noticing Joseph's embarrassment, or you are a proselyte, maybe, who at the end of the first year retired from the order? Many do so. Joseph did not know how to answer this question, for he had not obtained permission from the president to seek Jesus in Egypt, and it seemed to him that the most truthful account he could give of himself at the cenoby was to say that he was not there long enough to consider himself even a proselyte. He lived in the cenoby as a visitor, rather than as one attached to the order; but how far he might consider himself an Essene did not matter to anybody. Besides he wished to hear Jesus talk rather than to talk about himself, so he compared his residence with the Essenes to a clue out of which a long thread had unravelled: a thread, he said, that led me into the desert in search of thee.

Jesus had known Banu, in the desert, and listened attentively while Joseph told him how Banu was interrupted while speaking of the resurrection by a vision of John baptizing Jesus, and had bidden him go to Jordan and get baptism from John. But it was not John's baptism I sought, but thee, and I arrived breathless, to hear that thou hadst gone away with him, John not being able to bear the cold of the water any longer. Afterwards I sought thee hither and thither, till hearing of thee in Egypt I went there and sought thee from synagogue to synagogue.

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it, Jesus answered gently, and in a tenderer voice than his scrannel peacock throat would have led one to expect. And as if foreseeing an ardent disciple he began to speak to Joseph of God, his speech moving on with a gentle motion like that of clouds wreathing and unwreathing, finding new shapes for every period, and always beautiful shapes. He often stopped speaking and his eyes became fixed, as if he saw beyond the things we all see; and after an interval he would begin to speak again; and Joseph heard that he had met John among the hills and listened to him, and that if he accepted baptism from him it was because he wished to follow John: but John sought to establish the kingdom of God within the law, and so a dancing-girl asked for his head. It seemed as if Jesus were on the point of some tremendous avowal, but if so it passed away like a cloud, and he put his hand on Joseph's shoulder affectionately and asked him to tell him about Egypt, a country which he said he had never heard of before. Whereupon Joseph raised his eyes and saw in Jesus a travelling wonder-worker come down from a northern village—a peasant, without knowledge of the world and of the great Roman Empire. At every step Jesus' ignorance of the world surprised Joseph more and more. He seemed to believe that all the nations were at war, and from further discourse Joseph learnt that Jesus could not speak Greek, and he marvelled at his ignorance, for Jesus only knew such Hebrew as is picked up in the synagogues. He did not seek to conceal his ignorance of this world from Joseph, and almost made parade of it, as if he was aware that one must discard a great deal to gain a little, as if he would impress this truth upon Joseph, almost as if he would reprove him for having spent so much time on learning Greek, for instance, and Greek philosophy. He treated these things as negligible when Joseph spoke of them, and evinced more interest in Joseph himself, who admitted he had returned from philosophy to the love of God.

Now sitting on his bed, kept awake by his memories, Joseph relived in thought the hours he had spent with Jesus. He seemed to comprehend the significance of every word much better now than when he was with Jesus, and he deplored his obtuseness and revised all the answers given to Jesus. He remembered with sorrow how he tried to explain to Jesus the teaching of the Alexandrian philosophers regarding the Scriptures, paining Jesus very much by his recital but he had continued to explain for the sake of the answer that he knew would come at last. It did come. He remembered Jesus saying that philosophies change in different men, but the love of God is the same in all men. A great truth, Joseph said to himself, for every school is in opposition to another school. But how did Jesus come to know this being without philosophy? He had been tempted to ask how he was able to get at the truth of things without the Greek language and without education, but refrained lest a question should break the harmony of the evening. The past was not yet past and sitting on his bed in the moonlight Joseph could re-see the plain covered with beautiful grasses and flowers, with low flowering bushes waving over dusky headlands, for it was dark as they crossed the plain; and they had heard rather than seen the rushing stream, bubbling out of the earth, making music in the still night. He knew the stream from early childhood, but he had never really known it until he stood with Jesus under the stars by the narrow pathway cut in the shoulder of the hill, whither the way leads to Capernaum, for it was there that Jesus took his hands and said the words: "Our Father which is in Heaven." At these words their eyes were raised to the skies, and Jesus said: whoever admires the stars and the flowers finds God in his heart and sees him in his neighbour's face. And as Joseph sat, his hands on his knees, he recalled the moment that Jesus turned from him abruptly and passed into the shadow of the hillside that fell across the flowering mead. He heard his footsteps and had listened, repressing the passionate desire to follow him and to say: having found thee, I can leave thee never again. It was fear of Jesus that prevented him from following Jesus, and he returned slowly the way he came, his eyes fixed on the stars, for the day was now well behind the hills and the night all over the valley, calm and still. The stars in their allotted places, he said: as they have always been and always will be. He stood watching them. Behind the stars that twinkled were stars that blazed; behind the stars that blazed were smaller stars, and behind them a sort of luminous dust. And all this immensity is God's dwelling-place, he said. The stars are God's eyes; we live under his eyes and he has given us a beautiful garden to live in. Are we worthy of it? he asked; and Jew though he was he forgot God for a moment in the sweetness of the breathing of earth, for there is no more lovely plain in the spring of the year than the Plain of Gennesaret.

Every breath of air brought a new and exquisite scent to him, and through the myrtle bushes he could hear the streams singing their way down to the lake; and when he came to the lake's edge he heard the warble that came into his ear when he was a little child, which it retained always. He heard it in Egypt, under the Pyramids, and the cataracts of the Nile were not able to silence it in his ears. But suddenly from among the myrtle bushes a song arose. It began with a little phrase of three notes, which the bird repeated, as if to impress the listener and prepare him for the runs and trills and joyous little cadenzas that were to follow. A sudden shower of jewels it seemed like, and when the last drops had fallen the bird began another song, a continuation of the first, but more voluptuous and intense; and then, as if he felt that he had set the theme sufficiently, he started away into new trills and shakes and runs, piling cadenza upon cadenza till the theme seemed lost, but the bird held it in memory while all his musical extravagances were flowing, and when the inevitable moment came he repeated the first three notes. Again Joseph heard the warbling water, and it seemed to him that he could hear the stars throbbing. It was one of those moments when the soul of man seems to break, to yearn for that original unity out of which some sad fate has cast it—a moment when the world seems to be one thing and not several things: the stars and the stream, the odours afloat upon the stream, the bird's song and the words of Jesus: whosoever admires the stars and flowers finds God in his heart, seemed to become all blended into one extraordinary harmony; and unable to resist the emotion of the moment any longer, Joseph threw himself upon the ground and prayed that the moment he was living in might not be taken from him, but that it might endure for ever. But while he prayed, the moment was passing, and becoming suddenly aware that it had gone, he rose from his knees and returned home mentally weary and sad at heart; but sitting on his bedside the remembrance that he was to meet Jesus in the morning at Capernaum called up the ghost of a departed ecstasy, and his head drowsing upon his pillow he fell asleep, hushed by remembrances.

CHAP. XII.

A few hours later he was speeding along the lake's edge in the bright morning, happy as the bird singing in the skies, when the thought like a dagger-thrust crossed his mind that being the son of a rich man Jesus could not receive him as a disciple, only the poor were welcome into the brotherhood of the poor. His father had told him as much, and the beggar whom he had met under the cliffs, smelling of rags and raw garlic, expressed the riches of simplicity. Happy, happy evening, for ever gone by! Happy ignorance already turned into knowledge! For in Peter's house Jesus would hear that the man whom he had met under the cliffs was the son of the fish-salter of Magdala, and perhaps they knew enough of his story to add, who has been making money in Jerusalem himself and has no doubt come to Galilee to engage his father in some new trade that will extort more money from the poor. He is not for thy company. A great aversion seized him for Capernaum, and he walked, overcome with grief, to the lake's edge and stooped to pick up a smooth stone, thinking to send it skimming over the water, as he used to when a boy; but there was neither the will nor the strength in him for the innocent sport, and he lay down, exhausted in mind and body, to lament this new triumph of the demon that from the beginning of his life thwarted him and interrupted all his designs—this time intervening at the last moment as if with a purpose of great cruelty. This demon seemed to him to descend out of the blue air and sometimes to step out of the blue water, and Joseph was betimes moved to rush into the lake, for there seemed to him no other way of escaping from him. Then he would turn back from the foam and the reeds, and pray to the demon to leave him for some little while in peace: let me be with Jesus for a little while, and then I'll do thy bidding. Tie the tongues of those that would tell him I'm the son of a rich man—Simon Peter, James and John, sons of Zebedee. James would say a word in his favour, but Jesus would answer: why did he not tell these things to me overnight? And if he loves me, why does he not rid himself of the wealth that separates him from me?

Well, young Master, cried somebody behind him, now what be ye thinking over this fine morning? Of the fish the nets will bring to be safely packed away in your father's barrels? My father's barrels be accursed! Joseph exclaimed, springing to his feet. And why dost thou call me master? I'm not master, nor art thou servant. And then, his eyes opening fully to the external world, he recognised the nearly hunchback Philip of Capernaum—a high-necked, thick-set fellow, in whom a hooked nose and prominent eyes were the distinguishing features. A sail-maker, that spoke with a sharp voice, and Joseph remembered him as combining the oddest innocence of mind regarding spiritual things with a certain shrewdness in the conduct of his business. Thy voice startled me out of a dream, Joseph said, and I knew not what I said. Beg pardon, Master—but the word "Sir" you like no better, and it would sound unseemly to call you "Joseph" and no more. As we are not born the same height nor strength nor wits, such little differences as "Sir" and "Master" get into our speech. All those that love God are the same, and there is neither class nor wealth, only love, Joseph answered passionately. That is the teaching of the new prophet Jesus, Philip replied, his yapping voice assuming an inveigling tone or something like one. I was in Magdala yester evening, and spent the night in my debtor's house, and as we were figuring out the principal and interest a neighbour came in, and among his several news was that you were seen walking with Jesus by the lake in the direction of Capernaum. We were glad to hear that, for having only returned to us last night you did not know that Jesus has become a great man in these parts, especially since he has come to lodge in Simon Peter's house. That was a great step for him. But I must be hastening away, for a meeting is at Simon Peter's house. And I have promised Jesus to be there too, Joseph answered. Then we may step the way out together, Philip answered, looking up into Joseph's face, and—as if he read there encouragement to speak out the whole of his mind—he continued:

I was saying that it was a great step up for him when Simon Peter took him to lodge in his house, for beforetimes he had, as the saying is, no place to lay his head: an outcast from Cana, whither he went first to his mother's house, and it is said he turned water into wine on one occasion at a marriage feast; but that cannot be true, for if it were, there is no reason that I can see why he should stay his hand and not turn all water into wine. To which Joseph replied that it would be a great misfortune, for the greater part of men would be as drunk as Noah was when he planted a vineyard, and we know how Lot's daughters turned their father's drunkenness to account. Moreover, Philip, if Jesus had turned all the water into wine there would be no miracle, for a miracle is a special act performed by someone whom God has chosen as an instrument. It is as likely as not, Master, that you be right in what you say, for there's no saying what is true and what is false in this world, for what one man says another man denies, and it is not even certain that all men see and hear alike. But, Philip, thou must remember that though men neither hear nor see alike, yet the love of God is the same in every man. But is it? Philip asked. For can it be denied that some men love God in the hope that God may do something for them, while others love God lest he may punish them. But methinks that such love as that is more fear than love; and then there are others that can love God—well, just because it seems to them that God is by them, just as I'm by you at the present moment. Jesus is such an one. But there be not many like him, and that was why his teaching found no favour either in Cana or in Nazareth. In them parts they knew that he was the carpenter's son, and his mother and his brothers and sisters were a hindrance to him, for thinking him a bit queer, they came ofttimes to the synagogues to ask him to come home with them, for they are shrewd enough to see that such talk as his will bring him no good in the end, for priests are strong everywhere and have the law of the land on their side, for governors would make but poor shift to govern without them. But why then, Philip, shouldst thou who art a cautious man, be going to Peter's house to meet him? Well, that's the question I've been asking myself all the morning till I came upon you. Master, sitting by the lake, and not unlikely you were asking yourself the same question, sitting over yonder by the lake all by yourself. He casts a spell upon me, I'm thinking, and has, it would seem to me, cast one upon you, for you went a long way with him last night, by all accounts. I'd have it from thee, Philip, how long he has been in these parts? Well, I should say it must be two years or thereabouts that he came up from Jericho, staying but a little while in Jerusalem and going on to his mother at Cana, and afterwards trying his luck, as I have said, in Nazareth. But his mother hasn't seen him for many a year? He has been away since childhood, living with a certain sect of Jews called the Essenes, and it was John—— Yes, I know John was baptizing in Jordan, Joseph interrupted, and he baptized Jesus. And after that he went into the desert, said Philip hurriedly, for he did not like being interrupted in his story. He came up to Nazareth, I was saying, about two years ago, but was thrown out of that city and came here; he was more fortunate here, picking up bits of food from the people now and then, who, thinking him harmless, let him sleep in an odd hole or corner; but he must have often been like dying of hunger by the wayside, for he was always travelling, going his rounds from village to village. But luck was on his side, and when he was near dying a traveller would come by and raise him and give him a little wine. He is one of those that can do with little, and after the first few months he had the luck to cast out one or two devils, and finding he could cast out devils, he turned to the healing of the sick; and many is the withered limb that he put right, and many a lame man he has set walking with as good a stride as we are taking now, and many a blind man's eyes he has opened, and the scrofulous he cured by looking at them—so it is said. And so his fame grew from day to day; the people love him, for he asks no money from them, which is a sure way into men's affections; but those whose children he has cured cannot see him go away hungry, and they put a loaf into his shirt, for he takes anything that he can get except money, which he will not look upon. There has been no holier man in these parts, Sir, these many years. The oldest in the country cannot remember one like him—my father is nearer ninety than eighty, and he says that Jesus is a greater man than he ever heard his father tell of, and he was well into the eighties before he died. Now, Sir, as we are near to Peter's house, you'll not mind my telling you that there is no "Sir" or "Master" at Peter's house. But, Philip, has it not already been said that thou mayst drop such titles as "Sir" and "Master" in addressing me? And wert thou not at one with me that we should be more courteous and friendly one between the other without them? Well, yes, Master, I do recollect some such talk between us, but now that we be coming into Capernaum it would be well that I should call you "Joseph," but "Joseph" would be difficult to me at first, and we are all brothers amongst us, only Jesus is Master over all of us, and God over him. But it now strikes my mind that I have not told you how Jesus and Peter became acquainted.

One day as Jesus was passing on his rounds a man ran out of his house and besought him to help him to stop some boys who were playing drums and fifes and psalteries, saying to him: I know not who thou art, but my wife's mother is dying of fever, and the boys jeer at me and show no mercy. Let us take stones and cast them at them. But Jesus answered: no stone is required; and turning to the boys he said: boys, all this woman asks of you is to be allowed to die in quiet, and you may ask the same thing some day, and that day may not be long delayed. Whereupon the boys were ashamed, and Jesus followed Peter into his house and took his wife's mother's hand and lifted her up a little and placed her head upon the pillow and bade her sleep, which she did, and seeing that he had such power Peter asked him to remain in the house till his mother-in-law opened her eyes, which he did, and he has been there ever since. Now here we are at the pathway through which Jesus comes and goes every day on his mission of healing and preaching the love of God. Your father, Sir, is much opposed to Jesus, who he says has persuaded Peter away from his fishing and James and John and many others, but no doubt your father told you these things last night.

CHAP. XIII.

Yonder is Capernaum—or it would have been more in our speech had I said, why, brother, yonder is Capernaum. But habit's like a fly, brother, it won't leave us alone, it comes back however often and angrily we may drive it away.

Joseph made no reply, hoping by silence to quiet Philip's tongue which returned to the attack, he was fain to admit, not altogether unlike a fly. He tried not to hear him, for the sight of the town at the head of the lake awakened recollections of himself and his nurse walking valiantly, their strength holding out till they reached Capernaum, but after eating at the inn they were too weary to return to Magdala on foot and Peter had had to take them back in his boat. Peter's boat was his adventure in those days, and strangely distinct the day rose up in his mind that he and Peter had gone forth firm in the resolution that they would ascend the Jordan as far as the waters of Merom. They succeeded in dragging the boat over the shallows, but there was much wind on the distant lake. Peter thought it would not be well to venture out upon it, and Andrew thought so too. He was now going to see those two brothers again after a long absence and was not certain whether he was glad or sorry. It seemed to him that the lake, its towns and villages, were too inseparably part of himself for him to wish to see them with the physical eyes, and that it would be wiser to keep this part of Galilee, the upper reaches of the lake at least, for his meditations; yet he did not think he would like to return to Magdala without seeing Capernaum. Perhaps because Jesus was there. That Jesus should have pitched upon Capernaum as a centre revived his interest in it, and there was a certain pathetic interest attached to the memory of a question he once put to his father. He asked him if Capernaum was the greatest city in the world, and for years after he was teased till Capernaum became hateful to him; but Capernaum within the last few minutes regained its place in his affections. And as the town became hallowed in recollection he cried out to Philip that he could not go farther with him. Not go any farther with me, Philip answered: now why is that, brother, for Peter is waiting to see you and will take on mightily when I tell him that you came to the head of the lake with me and turned back. But it is Peter whom I fear to meet, Joseph muttered, and then at the sight of the long lean street slanting down the hillside towards the lake, breaking up into irregular hamlets, some situated at the water's edge close to the wharf where Peter's boats lay gently rocking, he repeated: it is Peter that I fear. But unwilling to take Philip into his confidence he turned as if to go back to Magdala without further words, but Philip restrained him, and at last Joseph confessed his grief—that being the son of a rich man he was not eligible to the society of the poor. You will ask me, he said, to give up my money to the poor, a thing I would willingly do for the sake of Jesus, whom I believe to be God's prophet; but how can I give that which does not belong to me—my father's money? That was my grief when you found me sitting on the stone by the lake's edge.

Whereupon Philip stood looking at Joseph as one suspended, for the first time understanding rightly that the rich have their troubles as well as the poor. At last words coming to him he said: money has been our trouble since Jesus drew us together, for we would do without money and yet we know not how this is to be done. Like you, Sir, I'm asking if I'm to sell my sails, those already out and those in the unrolled material, and if I do sell and give the money to the poor how am I to live but by begging of those that have not given their all? But why should I worry you with our troubles? But your troubles are mine, Joseph answered; and Philip went away to fetch Peter, who, he said, would be able to tell him if Jesus could accept a rich man as a disciple. If a man that has a little be permitted to remain, who is to say how much means interdiction? Joseph asked himself as he kept watch for Peter to appear at the corner of the street. And does he know the Master's mind enough to answer the question of my admission or—— The sentence did not finish in his mind, for Peter was coming up the street at that moment, a great broad face coming into its features and expression. The same high-shouldered fisher as of yore, Joseph said to himself, and he sought to read in Peter's face the story of Peter's transference from one master to another. It wasn't the approach of the Great Day, he said, for Peter never could see beyond his sails and the fins of a fish; and if Jesus were able to lift his thoughts beyond them he had accomplished a no less miracle than turning water into wine.

Well, young Master, he said, we're glad to have you back among us again. There be no place like home for us Galileans. Isn't that so? And no fishing like that on these coasts? But, Peter, Joseph interrupted, my father tells me that thou hast laid aside thy nets—but that isn't what I'm here to talk to thee about, he interjected suddenly, but about Jesus himself, whom I've been seeking for nearly two years, very nearly since I parted from you all, well nigh two years ago, isn't it? I've sought him in the hills of Judea, in Moab, in the Arabian desert and all the way to Egypt and back again. It's about two years since you went away on your travels, Master Joseph, and a great fine story there'll be for us to listen to when our nets are down, Peter said. I'd ask you to begin it now, Master Joseph, weren't it that the Master is waiting for us over yonder in my house. And from what Philip tells me you would have my advice about joining our community, Master Joseph. You've seen no doubt a good deal of the Temple at Jerusalem and know everything about the goings on there, and are with us in this—that the Lord don't want no more fat rams and goats and bullocks, and incense is hateful in his nostrils. So I've heard. They be Isaiah's words, aren't they, young Master? But there's no master here, only Jesus: he is Master, and if I call you "Master" it is from habit of beforetimes. But no offence intended. You always will be master for me, and I'll be servant always in a sense, which won't prevent us from being brothers. The Master yonder will understand and will explain it all to you better than I.... And Peter nodded his great head covered with frizzly hair. But, Peter, I am a rich man, and my father is too, and none but the poor is admitted into the Community of Jesus. That's what affrights him, Peter—his money, Philip interjected, and I have been trying to make him understand that Jesus won't ask him for his father's money, he not having it to give away. I'm not so sure of that, Peter said. The Master told us a story yesterday of a steward who took his master's money and gave it to the poor, he being frightened lest the poor, whom he hadn't been over-good to in his lifetime, might not let him into heaven when he died. And the Master seemed to think that he did well, for he said: it is well to bank with the poor. Them were his very words. So it seems to thee, Peter, that I should take my father's money? Joseph asked. Take your father's money! Peter answered. We wouldn't wrong your father out of the price of two perch, and never have done, neither myself nor John and James. Now I won't say as much for—— We love your father, and never do we forget that when our nets were washed away it was he that gave us new ones. I am sure thou wouldst not wrong my father, Joseph answered, and he refrained from asking Peter to explain the relevancy of the story he had just told lest he should entangle him. It is better, he said to himself, to keep to facts, and he told Peter that even his own money was not altogether his own money, for he had a partner in Jericho and it would be hard to take his money out of the business and give it all to the poor. Giving it to the poor in Galilee, he said, would deprive my camel-drivers of their living. Which, Peter observed, would be a cruel thing to do, for a man must be allowed to get his living, whether he be from Jericho or Galilee, fisher or camel-driver or sail-maker. Which reminds me, Philip, that thou be'st a long time over the sail I was to have had at the end of last month. And the twain began to wrangle so that Joseph thought they would never end, so prolix was Philip in his explanations. He had had to leave the sail unsewn, was all he had to say, but he embroidered on this simple fact so largely that Joseph lost patience and began to tell them he had come to Galilee, Pilate wishing him to add the portage of wheat from Moab to the trade already started in figs and dates. So Pilate is in the business, Peter ejaculated, for Peter did not think that a Jew should have any dealings with Gentiles, and this opinion, abruptly expressed, threw the discourse again into disarray. But Pilate is in Jerusalem, Joseph began. And has he brought the Roman eagles with him? Peter interrupted. And seeing that these eagles would lead them far from the point which he was anxious to have settled—whether the trade he was doing between Jerusalem and Jericho prevented him from being a disciple—Joseph began by assuring Peter that the eagles had been sent back to Cæsarea. Cæsarea, Peter muttered, our Master has been there, and says it is as full as it can hold of graven images. Well, Peter, what I have come to say is, that were I to disappoint Pilate he might allow the robbers to infest the hills again, and all my money would be lost, and my partner's money, and the camel-drivers would be killed; and if my convoys did not arrive in Jerusalem there might be bread riots. How would you like that, Peter?

Now what do ye say to that, Peter? and Philip looked up into Peter's great broad face. Only this, Peter answered, that money will shipwreck our Community sooner or later—we're never free from it. Like a fly, Philip suggested, the more we chase it away the more it returns. The fly cannot resist a sweating forehead, Philip, Peter said. Thine own is more sweaty than mine, Philip retorted, and a big blue fly is drinking his belly full though thou feelest him not, being as callous as a camel. The Master's teaching is, Peter continued, having driven off the fly, that no man should own anything, that everyone should have the same rights, which seems true enough till we begin to put it into practice, for if I were to let whosoever wished take my boats and nets to go out fishing, my boats and nets would be all at the bottom of the lake before the sun went down as like as not, for all men don't understand fishing. As we must have fish to live I haven't parted with my boats; but every time we take that turning down yonder to the lake's edge and I see my boats rocking I offer up a little prayer that the Master may be looking the other way or thinking of something else. James and John, sons of Zebedee, are of the same mind as myself—that we shouldn't trouble the Master too closely with the working out of his teaching. The teaching is the thing. Why, they be coming towards us, as sure as my name's Simon Peter, sent perhaps by the Master to fetch us, so long have we been away talking.

Joseph turned to greet the two young men, whom he had known always; as far back as he could remember he had talked to them over the oars, and seen them let down the nets and draw up the nets, and they had hoisted the sail for his pleasure, abandoning the fishing for the day, knowing well that Joseph's father would pay them for the time they lost in pleasing his son. And now they were young men like himself, only they knew no Greek; rough young men, of simple minds and simple life, who were drawn to Jesus—James a lean man, whose small sullen eyes, dilatory speech and vacant little laugh used to annoy Joseph. James always asked him to repeat the words though he had heard perfectly. Joseph liked John better, for his mind was sturdy and his voice grew sullen at any word of reproof and his eyes flamed, and Joseph wondered what might be the authority that Jesus held over him, a rough turbulent fellow, whom Joseph had always feared a little; even now in their greeting there was a certain dread in Joseph, which soon vanished, for John's words were outspoken and hearty. We're glad to have you back again amongst us, Master, I've been saying since I left Capernaum this morning. But "Master" is a word, John, that I've heard isn't used among you. Truly it is not used among the brotherhood, John answered. And I came to ask admission, Joseph said. Well, that be good news, Master—brother I should say, for our Master will be glad to meet thee. But that, Philip began, is just the matter we were speaking of among ourselves before we saw thee coming towards us. For there be a difficulty. He be as earnest as any of us, but our rule is what thou knowest it to be. Despite John's knowledge of the rule Philip began the story, and again he was so prolix in it that Joseph, wishing John to decide on the strict matter of it, and not to be lost in details, some of which were true and some of which were false and all confused in Philip's telling, interrupted the narrator, saying that he would give all the money that was strictly his, but his father's he couldn't give nor his partner's. We've many camels, he said, in common, and how are these to be divided? Nor is it right, it seems to me, that my partner should be left with the burden of all the trade we have created together; yet it is hard that I who have sought Jesus in the deserts of Judea as far as Egypt, and found him in Galilee, at home, should be forced to range myself apart from him, with whom my heart is. Would that the Master were here to hear him speak, Philip interjected. He was with the Master last night, and the Master was well pleased with him. It all depends on what mood the Master be in, John answered, and they all fell to asking each other what the Master's mood was that morning. But it would seem that all read him differently, and it was with joy at the prospect of a new opinion that they viewed Judas coming towards them.

And taking Judas into the discussion Peter said: now I've two boats, and John and James have four, so we aren't without money though our riches are small compared with the young Master's. Are we to sell our boats and give the money to the poor, and if we do who then will look after the Master's wants? They are small it is true, a bit of fish and bread every day, and a roof over his head; but who will give him a roof if mine be taken from me? Is not this so? All seemed in agreement, and Peter continued: I am thinking, John, that our new brother might help us to buy the Master a new cloak, for his is falling to pieces and my wife's mother is weary with patching it. He cured her of the fever, but she thinks that a great cost is put upon me and would ask the Master something for his keep. Whereupon John spoke out that the story of his mother-in-law was for ever the same; and seeing that he was offending Peter with the words he addressed against his wife's mother, though indeed Peter liked her not too much himself, Joseph put his hand in his pocket and said: here are some shekels, go and buy Jesus a cloak, but say not to him whence the money came.

Say not to him! Judas interjected. No need to tell him that can read the thoughts in the mind. It would be better for the young Master to give him one of his old cloaks. Jesus would question the new cloak and say it savours of money. He sees into the heart. We have tried to keep things from him before, Judas continued turning to Joseph.... It is our duty to save him as much as we can. Peter has done much and I've shared the expense with Peter, though I am a poor man; we pick the stones from his path, for he walks with his eyes fixed upon the Kingdom of God always. Yes, he sees into our hearts, Philip interrupted, and reads through all we are thinking even before the thoughts come into our minds. It is as Philip says, Judas muttered: our hearts are open to him always. But James, who had not spoken till now, put forward the opinion, and no one seemed inclined to gainsay it, that if Jesus knew men's thoughts before they came into men's minds he must be warned of them by the angels. He goes into the solitude of the mountains to converse with the angels, James said—for what else? Moses went into the clefts of Mount Sinai, Joseph added, and he asked Peter to tell him if Jesus believed that the soul existed apart from the body, at which question Peter was fairly embarrassed, for the soul must be somewhere, he said, and if there be no body to contain it—— You must ask the Master about these things, we have not considered them. All the same we are glad that you are with us and ready to follow him into danger, for if the Sadducees and Pharisees are against him we are with him. Is that not so, sons of Zebedee?

At the challenge the two lads came forward again and all began to talk of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the enthusiasm of the disciples catching upon Joseph he, too, was soon talking of the Kingdom that was to come, and whether they should all go down to Jerusalem together to meet the Kingdom and share it, or wait for it to appear in Galilee. Share and share alike, Joseph said. Ay, ay, sure we shall, and enjoy it, Peter rolled out at his elbow. But we must set our hearts in patience, for there be a rare lot to be converted yet. Every man must have his chance, and seeing Jesus coming towards him Peter waited till Jesus was by him. Haven't I thy promise, Master, he asked, laying his hand on Jesus' shoulder, that my chair in Kingdom Come will be next to thine? Before Jesus could answer John and James asked him if their chairs would not be on his left and right. But not next to the Master's, Peter answered. I'm on the right hand of the Master, and my brother Andrew on the left. Look into his face and read in it that I have said well. But the disciples were not minded to read the Master's face as Peter instructed them to read it, and might have come to gripping each other's throats if Jesus had not asked them if they would have the fat in the narrow chairs and the thin in the wide, as often happens in this world. The spectacle of Peter trying to sit on James' chair set them laughing, and as if to make an end of an unseemly disputation John asked the Master whither they were going to cure the sick that day? To which question Jesus made no answer, for he felt no power on him that day to cure the sick or to cast out demons. You'll see him do these things on another occasion, Peter whispered in Joseph's ear; to-day he's deep in one of his meditations, and we dare not ask him whither he be going, but must just follow him. As likely as not he'll lead us up into the hills for—— But I see Salome coming this way. You know her sons, John and James. The woman bears me an ill will and would have my chair set far down, belike as not between Nathaniel and Philip, who as you have noticed do not hold their heads very high in our company. But let us hasten a little to hear what she has to say. Listen, 'tis as I said, Master, Peter continued; you heard her ask him that her sons should sit on either side of him. Now mark his answer, if he answers her; I doubt if he will, so dark is his mood.

But dark though it was he answered her with a seeming cheerfulness that in the coming world there is neither weariness of spirit nor of body, and therefore chairs are not set in heaven. A fine answer that, and Peter chuckled; too wise for thee. Go home and ponder on it. We shall lie on couches when we are not flying, he added, and being in doubt he asked Joseph if the heavenly host was always on the wing. A question that seemed somewhat silly to Joseph, though he could not have given his reason for thinking it silly. Peter called on Jesus to hasten for the disciples were half way up the principal street at a turning whither their way led through the town by olive garths and orchards, and finding a path through these they came upon green corn sown in patches just beginning to show above ground, and the fringe of the wood higher up the hillside—some grey bushes with young oaks starting through them, still bare of leaves, ferns beginning to mark green lanes into the heart of the woods, and certain dark wet places where the insects had already begun to hum. But when the wood opened out the birds were talking to one another, blackbird to blackbird, thrush to thrush, robin to robin, kin understanding kin, and every bird uttering vain jargon to them that did not wear the same beak and feathers, just like ourselves, Joseph said to himself and he stood stark before a hollow into which he remembered having once been forbidden to stray lest a wolf should pounce upon him suddenly. Now he was a man, he was among men, and all had staves in their hands, and the thoughts of wolves departed at the sight of a wild fruit tree before which Jesus stopped, and calling John and James to him, as if he had forgotten Peter, he said: you see that tree covered with beautiful blossoms, but the harsh wind which is now blowing along the hillside will bear many of the blossoms away before the fruit begins to gather. And the birds will come and destroy many a berry before the plucker comes to pick the few that remain for the table. How many of you that are gathered about me now—— He stopped suddenly, and his eyes falling on John he addressed his question directly to him as if he doubted that Peter would apprehend the significance of the parable. But Joseph, whom it touched to the quick, was moved to cry out, Master, I understand; restraining himself, however, or his natural diffidence restraining him, he could only ask Peter to ask Jesus for another parable. Peter reproved Joseph, saying that it were not well to ask anything from the Master at present, but that his mood might improve during the course of the afternoon. Thomas, who did not know the Master as well as Peter, could not keep back the question that rose to his lips. Our trade, he said, is in apricots, but is it the same with men as with the apricots, or shall we live to see the fruit that thou hast promised us come to table? Whereupon James and John began to ask which were the blossoms among them that would be eaten by the birds and insects and which would wither in the branches. Shall I feed the insects, Master? Matthew asked, or shall I be eaten by the birds? A question that seemed to everyone so stupid that none was surprised that Jesus did not answer it, but turning to Philip he asked him: canst thou not, Philip, divine my meaning? But Philip, though pleased to come under the Master's notice, was frightened, and could think of no better answer than that the apricots they would eat in Paradise would be better. For there are no harsh winds in Paradise, isn't that so, Master? Thy question is no better than Salome's, Jesus answered, who sees Paradise ranged with chairs. Then everyone wondered if there were no chairs nor apricots in Paradise of what good would Paradise be to them; and were dissatisfied with the answer that Jesus gave to them, that the soul is satisfied in the love of God as the flower in the sun. But with this answer they had to content themselves, for so dark was his face that none dared to ask another question till Matthew said: Master, we would understand thee fairly. If there be no chairs nor apricots in Paradise there cannot be a temple wherein to worship God. To which Jesus answered: God hath no need of temples in Paradise, nor has he need of any temple except the human heart wherein he dwells. It is not with incense nor the blood of sheep and rams that God is worshipped, but in the heart and with silent prayers unknown to all but God himself, who knows all things. And the day is coming, I say unto you, when the Son of Man shall return with his Father to remake this world afresh, but before that time comes you would do well to learn to love God in your hearts, else all my teaching is vainer than any of the things in this world that ye are accustomed to look upon as vain. Upon this he took them to a mountain-side where the rock was crumbling, and he said: you see this crumbling rock? Once it held together, now it is falling into sand, but it shall be built up into rock again, and again it shall crumble into sand. At which they drew together silent with wonder, each fearing to ask the other if the Master were mad, for though they could see that the rock might drift into sand, they could not see how sand might be built up again into rock.

Master, how shall we know thee when thou returnest to us? Wilt thou be changed as the rock changes? Wilt thou be sand or rock? It was Andrew that had spoken; and Philip answered him that the Master will return in a chariot of fire, for he was angry that a fellow of Andrew's stupidity should put questions to Jesus whether they were wise or foolish; but could they be aught else than foolish coming from him? Andrew, persisting, replied: but we may not be within sight of the Master when he steps out of his chariot of fire, and we are only asking for a token whereby we may know him from his Father. My Father and thy Father, Andrew, Jesus answered, the Father of all that has lived, that lives, and that shall live in the world; and the law over the rock that crumbles into sand and the sand that is built up into rock again, was in that rock before Abraham was, and will abide in it and in the flower that grows under the rock till time everlasting. But, Master, wilt thou tell us if the rock we are looking upon was sand or rock in the time of Abraham? Philip asked, and Jesus answered him: my words are not then plain, that before that rock was and before the sand out of which the rock was built, was God's love—that which binds and unbinds enduring always though the rock pass into sand and the sand into rock a thousand times.

And it was then that a disciple poked himiself up to Jesus to ask him if they were not to believe the Scriptures. He answered him that the Scriptures were no more than the love of God. This answer did not quell the dissidents, but caused them to murmur more loudly against him, and Jesus, though he must have seen that he was about to lose some disciples, would retract nothing. The Scriptures are, he repeated, but the love of God. He that came to betray him said: and the Gentiles that haven't the Scriptures? Jesus answered that all men that have the love of God in their hearts are beloved by God. Is it then of no value to come of the stock of Abraham? the man asked, and Jesus replied: none, but a loss if ye do not love God, for God asks more from those whose minds he has opened than from those whose minds he has suffered to remain shut. At which Peter cried: though there be not a pint of wine in all heaven we will follow thee, and though there be no fish in heaven but the scaleless that the Gentiles eat—— He stopped suddenly and looked at Jesus, saying: there are no Gentiles in heaven. Heaven is open to all men that love God, Jesus said, and after these words he continued to look at Peter, but like one that sees things that are not before him; and the residue followed him over the hills, saying to themselves: he is thinking about this journey to Jerusalem, and then a little later one said to the others: he is in commune with the spirits that lead him, asking them to spare him this journey, for he knows that the Pharisees will rise up against him, and will stone him if he preach against the Temple. What else should he preach against? asked another disciple; and they continued to watch Jesus, trying to gather from his face what his thoughts might be, thinking that his distant eyes might be seeking a prediction of the coming kingdom in the sky. We might ask him if he sees the kingdom coming this way, an apostle whispered in the ear of another, and was forthwith silenced, for it was deemed important that the Master should never be disturbed in his meditations, whatever they might be.

He stood at gaze, his apostles and his disciples watching from a little distance, recalling the day his dog Coran refused to follow him, and seeing that the dog had something on his mind, he left his flock in charge of the other dogs and followed Coran to the hills above the Brook Kerith, down a little crumbling path to Elijah's cave. He found John the Baptist, and recognising in him Elijah's inheritor—at that moment a flutter of wings in the branches awoke him from his reverie, and seeing his disciples about him, he asked them whose inheritor he was. Some said Elijah, some said Jeremiah, some said Moses. As if dissatisfied with these answers, he looked into their faces, as if he would read their souls, and asked them to look up through the tree tops and tell him what they could see in a certain space of sky. In fear of his mood, and lest he might call them feeble of sight or purblind, his disciples, or many among them, fell to disputing among themselves as to what might be discerned by human eyes in the cloud; till John, thinking to raise himself in the Master's sight, so it seemed to Joseph (who dared not raise his eyes to the sky, but bent them on the earth), said that he could see a chariot drawn by seven beasts, each having on its forehead seven horns; the jaws of these beasts, he averred, were like those of monkeys, and in their paws, he said, were fourteen golden candlesticks. Andrew, being misled by the colour of the cloud which was yellow, said that the seven beasts were like leopards; whereas Philip deemed that the beasts were not leopards, for him they were bears; and they began to dispute one with the other, some discerning the Father Almighty in a chariot, describing him to be a man garmented in white; his hair is like wool, they said. And seated beside him Matthew saw the Son of Man with an open book on his knees. But these visions, to their great trouble, did not seem to interest Jesus; or not sufficiently for their intention; and to the mortification of Peter and Andrew, James and John, he turned to Thaddeus and Aristion and asked them what they saw in the clouds, and partly because they were loath to say they could see naught, and also thinking to please him, they began to see a vision, and their vision was an angel whom they could hear crying: at thy bidding, O Lord; on which he emptied his vial into the Euphrates, and forthwith the river was turned to blood. The second angel crying likewise, at thy bidding, O Lord, emptied his vial; and when the third angel had emptied his, three animals of the shape of frogs crawled out of the river; and then from over the mountains came a great serpent to devour the frog-shapen beasts, and after devouring them he vomited forth a great flood, and the woman that had been seated on it was borne away. It was Thaddeus that spoke the last words, and he would have continued if Jesus' eyes had not warned him that the Master was thinking of other things, perhaps seeing and hearing other things. It is known to you all, he said, that Jeremiah kneels at the steps of my Father's throne praying for the salvation of Israel? Therefore tell me what is your understanding of the words "praying for the salvation of Israel"? Was the prophet praying that Israel might be redeemed from the taxes the Romans had imposed upon them? Being without precise knowledge of how much remission Jeremiah might obtain for them, it seemed to them that it would be well to say that Jeremiah was praying to God to delay no longer, but send the Messiah he had promised. At which Jesus smiled and asked them if the Messiah would remit the taxes; and the disciples answered craftily that the Messiah would set up the Kingdom of God on earth: in which kingdom no taxes are levied, Jesus replied. Come, he said, let us sit upon these rocks and talk of the great prophecies, for I would hear from you how you think the promised kingdom will come to pass. And the disciples answered, one here, one there, and then in twos and threes. But, Master, thou knowest all these things, since it is to thee our Father has given the task of establishing his Kingdom upon earth; tell us, plague us no longer with dark questions. We are not alone, Thaddeus cried, a rich man's son is amongst us. If he have come amongst us God has sent him, Jesus said, and we should have no fear of riches, since we desire them not. This kindness heartened Joseph, who dared to ask Jesus how he might disburden himself of the wealth that would come to him at his father's death.

As no such dilemma as Joseph's had arisen before, all waited to hear Jesus, but his thoughts having seemingly wandered far, they all fell to argument and advised Joseph in so many different ways that he did not know to whom to accede so contradictory were all their notions of fairness; and, the babble becoming louder, it waked Jesus out of his mood, and catching Joseph's eyes, he asked him if he whom our Father sent to establish his Kingdom on earth would not have to give his life to men for doing it. A question that Joseph could not answer; and while he sought for the Master's meaning the disciples began again aloud to babble and to put questions to the Master, hurriedly asking him why he thought he must die before going up to heaven. Did not Elijah, they asked, ascend into heaven alive in his corporeal body?—and the cloak he left with Elisha, Aristion said, might be held to be a symbol of the fleshly body. This view was scorned, for the truth of the Scriptures could not be that the disciples inherited not the spiritual power of the prophet, but his fleshly show. Then the fate of Judas the Gaulonite rising up in Peter's mind, he said: but, Master, we shall not allow thee to be slain on a cross and given as food to the birds. The disciples raised their staves, crying, we're with thee, Master, and the forest gave back their oaths in echoes that seemed to reach the ends of the earth; and when the echoes ceased a silence came up from the forest that shut their lips, and, panic-stricken, all would have run away if Peter had not drawn the sword which he had brought with him in case of an attack by wolves, and swore he would strike the man down that raised his hand against the Master. To which Jesus replied that every man is born to pursue a destiny, and that he had long known that his led to Jerusalem, whereupon Peter cried out: we'll defend thee from thyself; for which words Jesus reproved him, saying that to try to save a man from himself were like trying to save him from the decree that he brings into the world with his blood. And what is mine, Master? It may be, Jesus answered, to return to thy fishing. Whereupon Peter wept, saying: Master, if we lose thee we're as sheep that have lost their shepherd, a huddled, senseless flock on the hillside, for we have laid down our nets to follow thee, believing that the Kingdom of God would come down here in Galilee rather than in Jerusalem; pray that it may descend here, for thou'lt be safer here, Master; we have swords and staves to defend thee—so let us kneel in prayer and ask the Lord that he choose Galilee rather than Judea for the setting up of his kingdom. To which Jesus answered nothing, and his face was as if he had not heard Peter; and then Peter's fears for Jesus' life, should he go to Jerusalem, seemed to pass on from one to the other, till all were possessed by the same fear, and Peter said: let us lift up our hearts to our Father in Heaven and pray that Jesus be not taken from us. Let us kneel, he said, and they all knelt and prayed, but to their supplication Jesus seemed indifferent. And seeing they were unable to dissuade him from Jerusalem, Peter turned to Joseph. Here is one, he said, who knows the perils of Jerusalem and will bear witness, that if thou preach that God have no need of a Temple or a sacrifice, thou'lt surely be done to death by the priests.

Peter's sudden appeal to his knowledge of the priests of Jerusalem awoke Joseph, who was wholly absorbed in his love of Jesus, and thought only of rushing forward and worshipping; but he was held back and strained forward at the same time, and seeing he was overcome, Peter did not press him for an answer, and Joseph fell back among the crowd, ashamed, thinking that if Peter came to him again he would speak forthright. He had words that would bring him into the sympathy of Jesus, but instead of speaking them he stood, held at gaze by the beauty of the bright forehead, large and arched; and so exalted were the eyes that Joseph could not think else than that Jesus was looking upon things that his disciples did not see. It seemed to Joseph that Jesus was meditating whether he should confide all he saw and heard to his disciples. He waited, tremulous with expectation, watching the thin scrannel throat out of which rose a voice to which the ear became attuned quickly and was gratified as by a welcome dissonance. It rose up among the silence of the pines, and the delight of listening to it, Joseph thought, was so near to intoxication that he would have pressed forward if he had not remembered suddenly that he was a new-comer into the community; one who might at any moment be driven out of it because he possessed riches which he could not unburden himself of. So he kept his seat in the background among the casual followers, by two men whose accents told him they were Samaritans, and these now seemed within the last few minutes to have become opposed to Jesus, and Joseph wondered at the change that had come over them and lent an ear to their discourse so that he might discover a reason for it. And it was not long before he discovered that their objection related to the Book of Daniel, for they were of the sort that receive no Scriptures after the five Books of the Law.

Joseph knew the book less perhaps than any other book of the Scriptures; he had looked into it with Azariah, but for a reason which he could not now discover he had read it with little attention; and since his schooldays he had not looked into it again. Peter and Andrew and John and James were listening intently to the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream for the sake of the story related and without thought of what might be Jesus' purpose in relating it. But to Joseph Jesus' purpose was the chief interest of the relation; and the purpose became apparent when he began to tell how the great statue seen by Nebuchadnezzar in his dream, whose head was gold, whose arms and breast were silver, whose belly was brass, and whose legs and feet were iron and clay intermingled, was overthrown by a stone that hand had not cut out of the mountain. This stone became forthwith as big as a mountain and filled the whole earth, and Joseph fell to thinking if this stone were the fifth kingdom which the Messiah would set up when the Roman kingdom had fallen to dust, or whether the stone were the Messiah himself. And while Joseph sat thinking he heard suddenly that when Nebuchadnezzar looked into the furnace and saw the four men whom he had ordered to be thrown into it walking through the flames safely, he said: and the form of the fourth is like the son of God.

The story wholly delighted the disciples; and they asked Jesus to tell them the further adventures of Daniel, and as if wishing to humour them he began to relate that a hand had appeared writing on the wall during the great feast at Babylon, a story to which Joseph could give but little heed, for his imagination was controlled by the words, "whose form is like the son of God"—an inspiration on the part of the Babylonian king. If ever a man had seemed since to another like the son of God, Jesus was that man; and Joseph asked himself how it was that these words had passed over the ears of the disciples—over the ears of those who knew Jesus' mind, if any could be said to know Jesus' mind. Jesus, though he lived near them and loved them, lived in the world of his own thoughts, which, so it seemed to Joseph, he could not share with anybody. Not one of the men he had gathered about him, neither Peter, nor John, nor James, had noticed the notable words: "And the form of the fourth is like the son of God." It was for these words, Joseph felt sure, that Jesus had related the story of Daniel in the furnace. But his disciples had not apprehended the significance; and like one whose confidence was unmoved by the slowness or the quickness of his listeners, almost as if he knew that the real drift of his speech was beyond his hearers, Jesus began to tell that Darius' counsellors had combined into a plot against Daniel and succeeded in it so well that Daniel and his companions were cast in a den of lions. But there being nothing in the story that pointed to the setting up of the Kingdom of God upon earth, Joseph was puzzled to understand why Jesus was at pains to relate it at such length. Was it to amuse his disciples? he asked himself, but no sooner had he put the question to himself than the purpose of the relation passed into his mind. Jesus had told the marvellous stories of Daniel's escapes from death so that his disciples might have no fear that the priests of Jerusalem would have power to destroy him: whomsoever God sends into the world to do his work, Jesus would have us understand, are under God's protection for ever and ever; and Joseph rejoiced greatly at having discovered Jesus' intent, and for a long time the glen, the silent forest and the men sitting listening to the Master were all forgotten by him. He even forgot the Master's presence, so filled was he by the abundant hope that his divination of the Master's intent marked him out as one to be associated with the Master's work—more than any one of those now listening to him, more than Peter himself.

And so sweet was his reverie to him that he regretted the passing of it as a misfortune, but finding he was in spirit as well as in body among realities, he lent his ear to the story of the four winds that had striven upon the great sea and driven up four great beasts. These beasts Joseph readily understood to be but another figuration of the four great empires; the Babylonian, the Persian, and the Grecian had been blown away like dust, and as soon as the fourth, the Roman Empire, was broken into pieces the kingdom of the whole world would be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. It was Philip the nearly hunchback that asked Jesus for an explanation of this vision—saying, and obtaining the approval of several for the question, would he, Jesus, acquiesce in this sharing of the earth among the angels who had not seen him, nor heard him, nor served him upon earth. If the earth is to be shared among the angels we follow thee in vain, he muttered; and Joseph felt that he could never speak freely again with Philip for having dared to interrupt the Master and weary him with questions that a child could answer. To whom Philip said: but you, young Master, that have received good instruction in Hebrew and Greek from the scribe Azariah, and have travelled far, do you answer my question. If the earth is to be shared among angels—— He was not allowed to repeat more of his question, for a clamour of explanation began among the disciples that the earth would not be shared among the angels of God—God would find his people repentant when he arrived with his son. At last the assembly settled themselves to listen to the story of the vision in which a ram pushed westward and northward and southward, till a he-goat came from the west—one with a notable horn between the eyes, and butted the ram till he had broken his two horns. Joseph had forgotten these visions, and he learnt for the first time, so it seemed to him, that the goat meant the Syrian king, Antiochus, who had conquered Jerusalem, polluted the sanctuary and set up heathen gods. But how are all these visions concerned with the setting up of the Kingdom of God on earth? and Jesus' purpose did not appear to him till Daniel heard a voice between the banks of the Ula crying: make this man understand. Joseph understood forthwith that Jesus' purpose was still the same, to make it plain to the disciples that Daniel was protected and guided by God, and, that being so, Jesus could go to Jerusalem fearing nothing, he being greater than Daniel. So he sat immersed in belief, hearing but faintly the many marvellous things that Daniel heard and saw, nor did he awake from his reverie till Jesus announced that Gabriel flew about Daniel at the hour of the evening oblation, telling him that seventy weeks was the measure of time allowed by God to make reconciliation for iniquity and bring everlasting righteousness, and build Jerusalem unto the Messiah; and that after three score and two weeks the Messiah should be cut off but not for himself.

The words "cut off but not for himself" troubled Joseph, and he pondered them, while the disciples marvelled at hearing Jesus speak of these things (he seemed to know the Scriptures by rote), and his voice went upward into the silence of the firs, and they heard as if in a dream that the king of the south should come into his kingdom and return to his own land. But his sons shall be stirred up and shall revolt against him, Jesus said, and the disciples marvelled greatly, for Jesus made clear the meaning that lay under these dark sayings, and they heard and understood how the robbers of the people should exalt themselves and establish a vision; but these shall fall and the king of the north shall come and cast up mounds and take the fortified cities. And they heard of destructions and leagues and armies and sanctuaries that were polluted, and of peoples who did not know their God, but who nevertheless became strong; and they heard of Edom and Moab and the children of Ammon, but at the end of all these troubles the Tabernacle was placed between the seas of the glorious holy mountain. And that day the fishers from the lake of Galilee and others heard that Michael had told the people of Israel that those that were dead should rise out of the earth and come into everlasting life. But can the dead be raised up and come to life in their corruptible bodies? asked the Samaritans that sat by Joseph, and their mutterings grew louder, and they denied that the prophet Daniel had spoken truth in this and many other things, and as he had not spoken truth he was a false prophet; whereupon so great a clamour arose that the wild beasts in the ravine began to growl, being awaked in their lairs. The disciples, foreseeing that it would soon be dark night in the forest, fell to seeking the way back to Capernaum, the Galileans in one group with Jesus among them, the Samaritans speeding away together and stopping at times for fresh discussion with the Galileans, asking among many other things how the corruptible body might be raised up to heaven and live indulging in the many imperfections inherent in our bodies. It was vain to ask them what justice there would be if the men that had died before the coming of the Kingdom of God were not raised up into heaven. If this were true the dead had led virtuous lives in vain; they might for all it had profited them have lived like the heathen.

It was at Capernaum that the truth became manifest that not only was Daniel denied, but Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the prophets since Moses, at which the disciples were greatly incensed and raised their staves against the Samaritans, but Jesus dissuaded his followers, and the dissidents were suffered to depart unhurt. Let them go, Jesus said, for they are in the hands of God, like ourselves, and he bade them all good-night, and there seemed to Joseph to be a great sadness in Jesus' voice, as if he felt that in this world there was little else but leave-taking.

Joseph too resented this parting, though it was for but a few hours; he would unite himself to Jesus, become one, as the mother and the unborn babe are one—he would be of the same mind and flesh; all division seemed to him loss, till, frightened at his own great love of Jesus, he stopped in the Plain of Gennesaret, star-gazing. But the stars told him nothing, and he walked on again. And it was about a half-hour's walk from Magdala that he overtook the Samaritans, who sought to draw him into argument. But he was in no humour for further discussion, and dismissed them, saying: what matter if all the prophets were false since the promised Messiah is among us. He has come, he has come! he repeated all the way home: and at every flight of the high stairs he tried to collect his thoughts. But his brain was whirling, and he could only repeat: he has come, he has come!

CHAP. XIV.

It seemed to Joseph as he hurried along the Plain of Gennesaret that the sun shone gayer than his wont, but as he approached Capernaum he began to think that the sun had risen a little earlier than his wont. Nobody was about! He listened in vain for some sound of life, till at last his ear caught a sound as of somebody moving along the wharves, and, going thither, he came upon Peter storing his oars in the boathouse. Making ready, Joseph said, for fishing? You don't see, Master, that I'm putting my oars away, but I'd as lief take them out again and fish till evening. Here was a mysterious answer from the least mysterious of men, and Peter continued in his work, throwing the oars into a corner like one that cared little if he broke them, and kicking his nets aside as if he were never going to let them down again into the lake: altogether his mood was of an exasperation such as Joseph had never suspected to be possible in this good-humoured, simple fellow. Had he been obliged to leave the community or sell his boats? If that were so, his chance (Joseph's chance) of entering the community was a poor one indeed; and he begged Peter to relate his trouble to him—for trouble there had been last night, he was sure of it.

Trouble there always is in this world, Peter answered, so long as I've known it, and will be till God sets up his kingdom. The sooner he does it the better, so say I. But I don't know about the saints we heard of yesterday, what they have to do with it. The Master's mood is stranger than I ever can recollect it, he said, standing up straight and looking Joseph in the eyes. It was yourself that said it yesterday, Peter, Joseph rejoined. I'm thinking it may have been the Samaritans that vexed him. Peter lifted his heavy shoulders and muttered: the Samaritans? We give no heed to them: and he began to speak, at first with diffidence; Joseph had to woo him into speaking, which he did; but after the first few minutes Peter was glib enough, telling Joseph that last night there had been stirs and quarrels among the disciples regarding his boats, and John's and James' boats too, he said, and by the jealous and envious, he muttered, who would like to come between us and the Master. Joseph asked who had raised the vexatious question, but Peter avoided it, and went about the wharf grunting that none could answer it: was it to Matthew, the publican, he was to give his boats? one, he said, who never was on the water in his life till I took him out for a sail a week come Tuesday. A fine use they'd be to him but to drown himself. A puff of wind, and not knowing how to take in a reef, the boat would be over in a jiffy and the nets lost. Now who would be the better for the loss of my nets? answer me that. And I'd like to be told when my boats and nets were at the bottom of the lake to whom would the Son of Man turn for a corner in which to lay his head, or for a bite or a sup of wine. John and James would give their boats to Judas belike, and he'd bring home about as much fish as would—— But I'm thinking of your father. What will he be saying to all this, and his business dwindling all the while, and we beggars?—the words with which my wife roused me this morning. Of course, says she, if the stone that never was cut out of the mountain with hands is going to be slung and send the Romans toppling, I've naught to say against sharing, but the Kingdom had better come quickly, Simon Peter, if thou'lt fish no more; and the woman is right, say I, though I hold with every word that falls from the Master's lips, only this way it is, he looks to my fishing for his support, and Miriam is quick to remind me of that. A good woman, one that has been always yielding to my will and never had a word against our lodger, but sets the best before him out of thankfulness for his saving of her mother's life, though one more mouth in a house is always a drain, if the Master is as easily fed as a sparrow. But restive she is now about the delay: as I was saying just now she wakes me up with a loud question in my ear: now, Simon Peter, answer me, art thou going into Syria to bid the blind to see, the lame to walk, and the palsied to shake no more, or art thou going to thy trade? for in this house there be four little children, myself, their mother, and thy mother-in-law. I say nothing against the journey if it bring thee good money, or if it bring the Kingdom, but if it bring naught but miracles there'll be little enough in the house to eat by the time ye come back. And, says she, the feeding of his children is a nobler work for a married man (she speaks like that sometimes) than bidding those to see who would belike be better without their eyes than with them. You wouldn't think it, but 'tis as I say: she talks up to me like that, and ofttimes I've to go to the Master and ask him to quiet her, which he rarely fails to do, for she loves him for what he has done for her mother, and is willing to wait. But last night when the busybodies brought her news that the Master had been preaching in the forest, of the sharing of the world out among the holy saints, she gave way to her temper and was violent, saying, by what right are the saints of the most high coming here to ask for a share of this world, as if they hadn't a heaven to live in. You see, good Master, there's right on her side, that's what makes it so hard to answer her, and I'm with her in this, for by what right do the holy saints down here ask for a share in the world, that's what keeps drumming in my head; and, as I told you a while ago, I'd as lief put out upon the lake and fish as go to Syria for nothing, say the word—— And leave the Master to go alone? Joseph interposed. Well, I suppose we can't do that, Peter answered, and then it seemed to Joseph wiser not to talk any more, but to allow things to fashion their own course, which they did very amiably, in about an hour's time the little band going forth, Joseph walking by Peter's side, hoping that he would not have to wait long before seeing a miracle.

Their first stop was at Chorazin, about five miles distant, and the sick began to rise quickly from their beds, and Jesus had only to impose his hands for the palsied to cease quivering. The laws of nature seemed suspended and Joseph forgot his father at Magdala and likewise Pilate's business which had brought him to Galilee. It will have to wait, he said, talking with himself, and now certain that he had come upon him whom he had always been seeking; it was as lost time to look at anything but Jesus, or to hear any words but his, or to admire aught but the manifestations of his power; and every time a sick man rose from his bed Joseph thanked God for having allowed him to live in the days of the Messiah. He saw sight restored to the blind, hearing to the deaf, swiftness of foot to cripples, issues of blood that had endured ten years stanched; the cleansing of the leper had become too common a miracle; he looked forward to seeing demons taking flight from the bodies of men and women, and accepted Peter's telling that the day could not be delayed much longer when he would see some dead man rise up in his cere-clothes from the tomb. He found no interest but in the miraculous, and his one vexation of spirit was that Jesus forbade his disciples (among whom Joseph now counted himself) to tell anybody that he was the Messiah.

In every town they were welcomed by the Gentiles as well as by the Jews, which was surprising, and set Joseph's wits to work; and these being well trained, he soon began to apprehend that the Jews accepted the miracles as testimony that Jesus was really the Messiah and that his teaching was true; whereas the Gentiles admired the miracles for their own sake, failing, however, and completely, to see that because he cured the blind, the palsied, the scrofulous and the halt, they should no longer visit their temples and sacred groves, and admire no more Pan's huge sexuality and hang garlands upon it, nor carve images of Diana and Apollo. Such abstinence they could not comprehend, and deemed it enough that they were ready to proclaim him a god on the occasion of every great miracle, a readiness that gave great scandal and caused many Jews to turn away from Jesus. It was not enough that he should repudiate this godhead; and the hardness of heart and narrowness of soul that he encountered among his own people afflicted Jesus as much as did the incontinency of the Gentiles, whom he sometimes met, bearing images in procession, going towards some shrine—the very same who had listened to his teaching in the evening. Joseph once dared throw himself in front of one of these processions, and he begged the processionists to Pan to throw aside the garlands and wreaths they had woven. This they would not do, but out of respect to the distinguished strangers that had come to their town they listened for some minutes to his relation that on the last day the dead would be roused by the trumpets of angels to attend the judgment and that the man Jesus before them—the Messiah announced hundreds of years ago in many a prophetic book—would return to earth in a chariot of fire by his Father's side, the Judgment Book in his hands. May we now proceed on our way? they asked, but Joseph besought them to listen to him for another few minutes, and thinking he had perhaps explained the resurrection badly, and forthwith calling to mind the philosophy of Egypt and Mathias, he asked them to apprehend that it would not be the corruptible body that would rise from the dead but the spiritual body, whereby he only succeeded in perplexing still further the minds of the worthy pagans of Cæsarea Philippi, and provoking stirs and quarrels among his own people.

The processionists took advantage of this diversion of opinion among the Jews to pass on and dispose of their wreaths and votive offerings as it pleased them to do. But on their way back they begged Jesus to perform some more miracles, which he refused to do, and to their great amazement he left them for the Tyrians and Sidonians. But the same difficulties occurred in Tyre and Sidon, the Gentiles accepting the miracles with delight but paying little heed to the doctrine. They begged him to remain with them and offered gifts for his services as healer, but he refused these and returned to Galilee, having performed miracles of all sorts, without, however, having bidden a dead man rise from the grave, to the great disappointment of Joseph, who would have liked to witness this miracle (the greatest of all); seemingly it was not his lot. Peter bade him hope!—the great miracle might happen in Galilee, and as such a miracle would evince the truth of Jesus' Messiah-ship even to his father, Joseph remained in Capernaum, going out in the boats with Jesus and his disciples, sailing along the shores till the people gathered in numbers sufficient for an exhortation. As there were always many Pharisees and Sadducees among the crowds assembled to hear the Master, he did not land, but preached standing up in the bow, Peter vigilant with an oar, for priests are everywhere enemies of reformation and instigate attacks upon reformers, and those made on Jesus were often so violent that Peter had to strike out to the right and left, but he always managed to get free, and they sailed for less hostile coasts or back to the wharf at Capernaum.

It once occurred to them to try their luck with the Gadarenes, and it was in returning from their coasts one evening that Peter's boat was caught in a great storm and that Joseph was met by one of his father's servants as he jumped ashore. The man had come to tell him that if he wished to see his father alive he must hasten to Magdala, and Joseph glared at him dumbfounded, for he had suspected all along that he had little or no right at all to leave his father for Jesus. I did not know I was like this, he blurted out to himself. And as much to silence his accusing conscience as anything else he questioned the stupid messenger, asking him if his father had seen a physician, and if the physician had held out any hopes of a recovery. But the thin and halting account which was all the messenger could give only increased Joseph's alarm, and it was with much difficulty that he learnt from him that the master had brought some walnuts to the parrots, and just after giving a nut to the green parrot had cried out to Tobias that a great pain had come into his head. Joseph dug his heels into his ass's side and cried to the messenger: and then? The messenger answered that the pain in the back of his father's head had become so great that he had begun to reel about, overthrowing one of the parrots on its perch. The parrot flew at master, thinking he had done it—— Never mind the parrot, Joseph replied angrily, confusing the messenger, who told him that the master had entered the house on Tobias' arm, and had sat down to supper but had eaten nothing to speak of. None of us dared to go to bed that night, the messenger continued. We sat up, expecting every moment somebody to come down from the room overhead to tell us that the master was dead. The next part of the messenger's story was like a tangled skein, and Joseph half heard and half understood that the great physician that had come from Tiberias had said that he must awaken the master out of the swoon and at any cost. He kept bawling at him, the messenger said. Bawling at him, Joseph repeated after the messenger, and the messenger repeated the words, bawling at him, and saying that the physician said the master's swoon was like a wall and that he must get him to hear him somehow. He said the effort would cost your father, Sir, a great deal, but he must get him to hear him. The story as the servant related it seemed incredible, but he reflected that servants' stories are always incredible, and Joseph learned with increasing wonder that Dan had heard the physician and sat up in bed and spoken reasonably, but had fallen back again unconscious, and that the physician on leaving him said that they must get his mouth open somehow and pour a spoonful of milk into his mouth, and call upon him as loudly as they could to swallow. What physician have they sent for? Joseph asked the messenger, but he could not remember the name.

It was Ecanus who was sitting by Dan's bedside when Joseph arrived, and Joseph learnt by careful nursing and feeding him every ten minutes there was just a chance of saving Dan's life.

For seven days Dan's life receded, and it was not till the eighth day the wheel of life paused on the edge of the abyss. Dan, with his eyes turned up under the eyelids, only the white showing, lay motionless; and it was not till the morning of the ninth day that the wheel began to revolve back again; but so slow were its revolutions that Joseph was in doubt for two or three days. But on the fifth day he was sure that Dan was mending, and in about three days more the pupils of Dan's eyes looked at his son's from under the eyelids. He spoke a few words and took his milk more easily, without being asked to swallow. The pains in his head returned with consciousness; he often moaned; the doctor was obliged to give him opiates, but he continued to mend and in three weeks was speaking of going out to walk in the garden. To gain his end he often showed a certain childish cunning, urging Joseph on one occasion to go to the verandah to see if somebody was coming up the garden, and as soon as Joseph's back was turned he slipped out of bed with the intention of getting to his clothes. He fell, without, however, hurting himself, and was put back to bed and kept there for three more weeks before he was allowed a short walk. Even then the concession seemed to be given too soon; for he could not distinguish the different trees, nor could he see the parrots, though he could hear them, and he remained in purblindness for some two or three weeks; but his sight returned, and he said to Joseph: that is a palm-tree and that is a pepper-tree. Joseph answered that he said truly and hastened across the garden to meet Ecanus, for he desired to ask him privily if his father were out of all danger; and the answer to his question was that Dan's life would pass away in a swoon like the one he had just come out of, but he might swoon many times—two or three times, perhaps oftener—before he swooned for the last time. More than that Ecanus could not say. A silence fell suddenly between them, and wondering what term of life his father had still to traverse before he swooned into eternity, Joseph followed the physician through the wilting alleys, seeking the shadiest parts, for the summer was well-nigh upon them now.

At the end of one of these, out of the sun's rays, the old man lay propped up among cushions, dreaming, or perhaps only conscious, of the refreshing breeze that came and went away again. But he awoke at the sound of their steps on the sanded paths, and raised his stick as a sign to them to come to him, and, seeing that he wished to speak, Joseph leaned over his chair, putting his ear close to his father's face, for Dan's speech was still thick and often inarticulate. Thou wast nearly going down in the storm, he said, and Joseph could hardly believe that he heard rightly, for what could his father know of the storm on the lake, he being in a deep swoon at the time beyond the reach of words. He asked his father who had told him of the storm, but Dan could say no more than that a voice had told him that there was a great storm upon the lake and that Joseph was in it. Miracle upon miracle! Joseph cried, and he related his escape from shipwreck; how when coming in Peter's boat from the opposite shores the wind had risen, carrying the lake in showers over the boat till all were wetted to their skins. But, unmindful of these showers, Jesus had continued his teaching, even after a great wave wrenched away a plank or part of one. Master, if the boat be not staunched we perish, Peter said, for which Jesus rebuked Peter and called them all to come forward and kneel closer about him. Kneel, he said, your faces towards me, and forget the plank and remember your sins. We could not do else but as we were bidden, and we all knelt about him, our thoughts fixed as well as we were able to fix them on our sins, but the water was coming into the boat all the while, and in the midst of our prayers we said: in another moment we perish if he stay not the wind and waves. We thought that he would stand up in the bow and command, but he remained seated, and continued to teach us, but the wind lulled all the same, and when we looked round the boat was staunch again, and we made the wharf at Capernaum easily.

Ecanus, who was a man of little faith, asked Joseph if he had seen anybody put his hand to the plank and restore it to its place, and Joseph answered that all were grouped round the Master praying, and that none had fallen away from the group. But there were some in the boat that saw a little angel speeding over the waves. Philip saw both wings and the angel's feet, but I had only a glimpse. If you would only let me bring him to you—— But, reading his father's face, Joseph continued: if you haven't faith, Father, he couldn't do anything for thee. Father, let me bring him. This shows no distrust in your power, he interjected suddenly, turning to Ecanus. Each man has powers given to him; some are physical and some spiritual; some are powerful in one element and some in another. But no magician that I have met has power over fire and water. Only those into whom God has descended can command both fire and water alike. And he related that when they passed through Chorazin and a woman ran out of her house crying that her little boy had fallen into the fire, Jesus had asked her if she had applied any remedy, and on her saying she had not, he had said: then I will cure him. With his breath he restored him, and five minutes after the child was playing with his little comrades in the street. If, however, she had poured oil on the wounds he couldn't have cured them, Joseph explained, for his affinity with fire would have been interrupted. In the village of Opeira a child while carrying a kettle of boiling water from the fire tipped it over, burning a good deal of the flesh of one foot, which, however, healed under Jesus' breath almost as soon as he had breathed upon it. And yet another child was healed of the croup, but this time it was John who imposed his hands: Jesus had transmitted some of his power over the ills of the flesh to the disciples. On Dan asking if Joseph had seen Jesus cast out devils, Joseph replied that he had, but it would take some time to tell the exordium. Whereupon Ecanus remembered that other patients waited for his attendance and took his leave, warning Joseph before leaving against the danger of tiring his father, a thing that Joseph promised not to do; but as soon as the door closed after the physician Dan began to beg so earnestly for stories that Joseph could not do else than tell him of the miracle he had witnessed. Better to submit, he thought, than to agitate his father by refusal; and he began this narrative; the morning of the storm, which they would not have succeeded in weathering had it not been for the intervention of the angel. Jesus and some of the disciples, including Joseph, had set their sail for the Gadarene coasts; and finding a landing-place by a shore seeming desolate, they proceeded into the country; and while seeking a sufficient number to exhort and to teach, their search led them past some broken ruins, shards of an old castle, apparently tenantless. They were about to pass it without examination when a wailing voice from one of the turrets brought them to a standstill. They were not at first certain whether the wailing sound was the voice of the wind or a human voice, but they had hearkened and with difficulty had separated the doleful sound into: woe! woe! woe! unto thee Jerusalem, woe! woe! It sounds to me, Peter said, like one that is making a mock of thee, Master. Having heard that thou foretellest woe to Chorazin—— But Judas, seeing a cloud gathering on Peter's face, nudged Peter, and the twain went up together and some minutes after returned with a half-naked creature, an outcast whom they had found crouching like a jackal in a hole among the stones, one clearly possessed by many devils. Now as all were in wonder what his history might be, a swineherd passing by at the time told them how the poor, naked creature would take a beating or a gift of food for his singing with the same gentle grace. The words had hardly passed the swineherd's lips than the possessed began to sing:

Woe! woe! woe! the winds are wailing.
The four great sisters, the winds of the world
Call one to the other, and it is thy doom
They are calling, Jerusalem.
Woe! woe! woe!
The North brings ruin, the South brings sorrow,
The East wind grief, and the West wind tears
For Jerusalem.
Woe! woe! woe!

And he sung this little song several times, till the hearts of the disciples hardened against the outcast and they were minded to beat him if he did not cease; but the swineherd warned them that a surer way to silence him was by giving him some food; and while he stood by eating, the swineherd confided the story of the fool, or as much of it as he knew, to Jesus. The fool, he said, came from Jerusalem some two years ago. He had been driven out of the Temple, which he frequented daily, crying about the courts the song with which he wearied you just now, till the most patient were unable to bear it any longer; and every time he met a priest he looked into his face and sang: woe! woe! woe! unto Jerusalem, and whenever he met a scribe he would cry: woe! woe! woe! unto Jerusalem, hindering them in their work about the Temple. Some stones were thrown, but enough life was left in him to crawl away, and as soon as he recovered from his wounds he was about again, singing his melancholy ditty (he knows but one). He was told if he did not cease he would be beaten with rods, but he could not cease it, and started his ditty again as soon as he could bear a shirt on his back; and then he must have travelled up here afoot, picking up a bit here and a bit there, getting a lift in an ox-cart. He is without memory of anything, who he is, where he came from, or who taught him his song. He does not know why he chose that broken tower for a dwelling, nor do we, but fortunately it stands in a waste. We hear him singing as we go by to our work and pitch him scraps of food from time to time. We hear him as we return in the evening to our homes making his melancholy dwelling sadder with his song. But he is a harmless, poor fool, save for the annoyance of his song, which he cannot stanch any more than the wind in the broken turrets. A harmless fool who will follow whosoever asked him to follow, unafraid, and taking a blow or a hunch of bread in the same humour, and distinguishing no man from the next one.

As the swineherd said these words the fool said: Jesus, thou hast come to my help, but woe to thee, Son of God, thou wilt suffer thy death in Jerusalem; and looking up into Jesus' face more intensely: oh, Son of Man, what aileth thee or me? And knowest thou anything of the cloud of woe that hangs over Jerusalem? To which Jesus made no answer, but called upon the devils to say how many there were, and they answered: three. Then depart ye three, Jesus replied, and was about to impose his hands when the three devils asked whither they should go, to which Jesus answered: ye must seek another refuge, for here ye cannot remain. Seek among the wolves and foxes. But these will flee from us, the devils answered; allow us to enter the hogs rooting the ground before thee. But at this the swineherd cried out: forbid the devils to enter into my hogs, else they will run over the cliffs and drown themselves in the sea. Though you are Jews, and do not look favourably on hogs, they are as God made them. To which Jesus answered, turning to his disciples: the man speaks well, for if unclean they be, it was the will of God that made them so. And taking pity on the hogs that were rooting quietly, unaware of the devils eager to enter into them, he said: there are statues of gods and goddesses in Tiberias, enter into them. And immediately the devils took flight, giving thanks to Jesus as they departed thither.

Joseph waited a moment and tried to read his father's face. But Dan's face remained fixed, and as if purposely, which vexed Joseph, who cried: now, Father, you may believe or disbelieve, or be it thou'rt naturally averse from Jesus, but thou knowest as well as I do that two days after the great storm a statue of the goddess Venus fell from her pedestal in the streets of Tiberias and was broken. But, Joseph, when the statue fell I was sick and had no knowledge of the fall. But if a statue of the goddess Venus did fall from her pedestal, I'd ask why the devils should choose to destroy false gods? Were it not more reasonable for them to uphold the false gods safe and secure on their pedestals? The gods were overthrown for a sign that the devils had left the fool's body, Joseph answered. But why, Dan replied, didn't three statues fall?—a statue for each devil—and whither did the devils go? That one statue should fall was enough for a sign, Joseph said, but no more would he say, for his father's incredulity irritated him, and seeing that he had angered his son, Dan stretched his hand to him and said: perhaps we are more eager to believe when we are young than when we are old. And he asked Joseph to tell him of some other miracle that he might have seen Jesus perform.

Joseph had seen Jesus perform many other miracles, but he was loath to relate them, for none, he felt sure, would impose upon his father the belief that Jesus was the Messiah that was promised to the Jews. All the same the miracle of the woods rose in his mind, and so plainly that he could not keep the story back, and almost before he was aware of it he began the relation, telling how Jesus, James, John, Andrew, and himself were at table, mingling jest with earnest (Peter was not with them, being kept at home, for his wife was in child-birth at the time), when the women of the village were heard running up the street crying together to the men to take part in the chase of the wild man of the woods, who had come down amongst them once more questing the flesh of women. But this time we'll put a stop to his leaping, they cried. A goatherd coming from the hills has seen him enter a cave and as soon as he has folded his goats he will lead us to it. But the villagers were in no mood for waiting; the goats could be folded by another; and the goatherd was bidden and obliged to leave his goats and lead the way, Jesus and his disciples following with the others through the forest till we came to a ravine. And the goatherd said: look between yon great rocks, for it was between them he passed out of my sight. And let one of you creep in after him, but I must return to my goats, having no confidence that they have been properly folded for the night. The goatherd would have run away if he hadn't been held fast, and there were questions as to who would enter. The first said "no," the second the same, giving as reason that they were not young or strong enough, whereas the goatherd was both, and none better endowed for the struggle; and the people became of one mind that they must beat the goatherd with the crows if he did not go down into the cave, but Jesus, arriving in time, said: it is not lawful to break into any man's dwelling with crows, nor to kill him because his sins affront you; let us rather give him means to cut himself free from sins. At which words the people were near to jeering, for it seemed to them that Jesus knew little of the man they were pursuing, and they knew not what to understand when he asked if any among them had a long, sharp knife, and there was a movement as if they were about to leave him; but one man said: thou shalt have mine, Master, and, taking it out of his girdle, he gave it to Jesus, who tested it with his thumb, and, satisfied with it, laid it on the rock beside the cave. But the people began to mutter: he will use the knife against us, Master. Not against you, Jesus answered, but against himself, thereby defending himself against himself. There were mutterings among the people, and some said that his words were too hard to understand, but all were silent as soon as Jesus raised his hands and stepped towards the cave, and began to breathe his spirit against the lust that possessed the man's flesh. We must return here, he said, with oil and linen cloths. At which all wondered, not knowing what meaning to put upon his words, but they believed Jesus, and came at daybreak to meet him at the edge of the forest and followed the path as before till they came to the hillside. The man was no longer hidden in his cave, but sat outside by the rock on which Jesus had laid the knife, and Jesus said: happy is he born into the world without sting, and happy is he out of whom men have taken the sting before he knew it, but happier than these is the man that cuts out the part that offends him, setting the spirit free as this man has done.

Joseph ceased speaking suddenly and stood waiting for his father to admire the miracle he had related, but Dan's tongue struggled with words; and Joseph, being taken as it were with another flux of words, and like one apprehensive of the argument that none shall undo God's handiwork, set out on the telling that the cause of man's lust of women was that God and the devil had a bet together—the devil saying that if God let him sting a man in a certain part of his hide he would get him in the end despite all that God might do to save him from hell. To which God, being in the humour, consented, and the sting was put into nearly all men. A few the devil overlooked, and these have much spared to them, and those out of whom the sting is taken in childhood are fortunate, but those who, like the wild man of the wood, cut the sting out of their own free will are worthy of all praise; and he cited the authority of Jesus that man should mutilate his body till it conform perforce to his piety. But the story of man's fall is told differently in the Book of Genesis, my son. The admonition that he was laying violent hands on a sacred book startled Joseph out of his meditations, and in some confusion of words and mind he began to prevaricate, saying that he thought he had made himself clear: the release of pious souls from the bondage of the flesh was more important than the continuance of the impious. Moreover in the days of Moses, Israel was not steeped in as many iniquities as she is now, and the Day of Judgment was not so close at hand. More men meant more sins, and sin has become so common that God can endure the torture no longer.... Again Joseph ceased speaking suddenly and, almost agape, stood gazing into his father's face, reading therein a great perplexity, for Dan was asking himself for what good reason had God given him so strange a son. He would have been content to let the story pass into another, but Joseph was waiting for him to speak, and speaking incontinently he said he had heard that in the Temple of Astoreth the Phoenician youths often castrated themselves with shards of shells or pottery and threw their testicles in the lap of the goddess crying out: art thou satisfied now, Astoreth? But he did not know of any text in their Scriptures that counselled such a practice; and the introduction of it seemed to savour of borrowing from the heathen. Whereupon Joseph averred that whereas the wont of the Phoenician youths is without reason, the same could not be said of Jesus' device to save a soul. To which Dan rejoined that the leaving of the knife for the man to mutilate himself with, seemed to him to be contrary to all the rumours of Jesus that had come to his ears. I have heard that he would set the law aside and the traditions of our race, declaring the uncircumcised to be acceptable to God as the Jew; that he sits down to food with the uncircumcised and lays no store on burnt offerings. Nor did Isaiah, Joseph interrupted, and circumcision is itself a mutilation. I do not contest its value, mark you; but if thou deny'st that Jesus was right to leave a knife whereby the sinner might free himself from sin thou must also deny circumcision. Circumcision is the sign of our race, Dan answered. A physical sign, an outward sign, Joseph cried, and he asked his father to say if the Jews would ever forget priests and ritual; and he reminded his father that the once sinner, now a holy anchorite, did not bring an appetency into the world that could be overcome by prayer, and so had to resort to the knife that he might live in the spirit. It seems to me, Joseph, that we should live as God made us, for better or worse. But, Father, once you admit circumcision—— A man should not be over-nice, Joseph, and though it be far from my thought to wish to see thee a fornicator or adulterer it would rejoice me exceedingly to see grandchildren about me. There is a maiden—— Another reason, Father, of which I have not yet spoken makes the marriage of the flesh seem a vanity to me, and that is—— I know it well, Joseph, that the great day is coming when the world will be remoulded afresh. But, Father, do ye believe in nothing but observances? Tell me, Joseph, did thy prophet ever raise anybody from the dead? Yes, and hoping to convince his father by another miracle he fell to telling eagerly how a young girl who was being carried to the grave was called back to life.

She was, he said, coming from her wedding feast. And he told how there were in the village two young girls, one as fair as the other, rivals in love as well as in beauty, both having the same young man in their hearts, and for a long time it seemed uncertain which would get him; for he seemed to favour them alternately, till at length Ruth, unable to bear her jealousy any longer, went to the young man, saying that she was close on a resolve to see him no more. Your lover? he answered, his cheek blanching, for he dearly loved her. I haven't gotten a lover, she said; only a share in a lover. Your words, Ruth, relieve me of much trouble, he replied, and took her in his arms and said: it was a good thought that brought you hither, for if you hadn't come I might never have been able to decide between you, but your coming has given me strength, and now I know which I desire. And then it was the girl's cheek that grew pale, for he hadn't answered at once which he would have. Which? she asked, and he replied: you, not Rachel. If that be so, she answered, I am divided between joy and sorrow; gladness for myself, sorrow for my friend; and it behoves me to go to her and tell her of her loss. I am the chosen one, she said to Rachel, who turned away, saying: had I gone to him and asked him to choose between us he would have chosen me. He couldn't do else.

She began to brood and to speak of a spell laid upon the young man, and her visits to a sorceress came to be spoken about so openly that it was against the bridegroom's wish that Rachel was asked to the wedding feast; but Ruth pleaded, saying that it would be no feast for her if Rachel did not present herself at the table. The twain sat opposite each other at table, Rachel seemingly the happier, eating, drinking, laughing, foretelling that Mondis would fill Ruth's life with happiness from end to end. Thou wilt never see the face of an evil hour, she said, and Ruth in her great joy answered: Rachel, I know not why he didn't choose thee; thou'rt so beautiful; and the young Mondis wooed her at the table, to Ruth's pleasure, for she knew of his thankfulness to Rachel for allowing the wedding to pass in concord, without a jarring note.

She seemed to listen to him as a sister might to a beloved brother, and as the wedding feast drew to a close she said: Ruth shall drink wine with me, and the cups were passed across the table, and laughter and jest flowed on for a while. But soon after drinking from Rachel's cup Ruth turned pale and, leaning back into the arms of her bridegroom, she said: I know not what ails me.... And then a little later on she was heard to say: I am going, and with a little sigh she went out of her life, lying on her bridegroom's arm white and still like a cut flower. The word "poison" swelled up louder and louder, and all eyes were directed against Rachel, who to prove her innocence drank the wine that was left in Ruth's glass; but it was said afterwards that she had not drunk out of the cup that she had handed to Ruth. Be this as it may, a house of joy was turned into a house of tears. Bridegroom, parents and friends fell into procession, and we who were coming down the street met the bier, and after hearing the story of the girl's death Jesus said: let me speak to her, and, leaning over her, he whispered in her ear, and soon after we thought it was the wind that stirred the folds of her garments, but her limbs were astir in them; the colour came back to her cheeks; she raised herself on her bier, and with his bride in his arms the bridegroom worshipped Jesus as a god; but Jesus reproved him, saying: it was by the power of God working through me that she was raised from the dead: give thanks to him who alone merits our thanks. But Rachel, who had been following the bier in great grief, hanging on the bridegroom's arm could not contain herself at the sight of Ruth raised from the dead, and it wrenching her reason out of her control compelled her to call upon the people to cast out the Nazarene, who worked cures with the help of the demons with whom he was in league, which proved to everybody that her friendly words to Ruth at the feast were make-believe, and that she had been plotting all the while how she might ruin her.

At the sight of Ruth beautiful and living naught mattered to Rachel but revenge, and she crossed the street as if with the intention of striking her with a dagger, but as she approached Jesus the flame of fury died out of her face, and like one overwhelmed with a great love she cast herself at his feet, and could not be removed. Why do you turn the woman from me? he asked. Whatever her sins may have been they are forgiven, for she loves me. But she loved the other man five seconds before, Dan submitted, and Joseph replying to him said: she only knew that passion of the flesh which we share with the beasts of the fields, the fowls of the air and the fish in the sea. But now she loves Jesus as we love him—with the spirit. And next day she brought all her wealth to him; the golden comb she was wont to wear in her hair she would place in his; and the silks and linen in which she was wont to clothe herself she laid at his service; but he told her to sell all these things and give the money to the poor. Give to the poor! That is what I hear always, cried Dan; but if we gave all to the poor we would be as poor as the very poorest; and where, then, would the money come from with which we now help the poor?

Give to the poor that thou mayest become worthy of a place in the world to come. This world is but a shadow—an illusion, Joseph answered defiantly. Thou hast that answer for everything, Joseph; and another day when I'm stronger I'll argue that out with thee. I have tired thee, Father; but if I've told you many stories it was because—— Because, Dan retorted, thou wouldst have Jesus cast his spells over me. But I've no use for them; thou art enough.

And while Joseph debated how he might convince his father that the girl was really dead, Dan asked for news of Rachel, and Joseph answered that she was with them every day, that their company had been increased by several devoted women. Thou hast talked enough, Father, and more than enough; if Ecanus were to return he would accuse me of planning to talk you to death.

CHAP. XV.

Like every other old Jew, Dan liked the marvellous, and listened to his son's stories, not knowing whether he believed or disbelieved, nor seeking to inquire; content to enjoy the stories as they went by, he listened, suffering such a little disappointment when his son's voice ceased as he might at the death of a melodious wind among the branches, the same little sadness. Moreover, while Joseph talked he had his attention, and it irritated him to see Joseph's thoughts wander from him in search of parrots and monkeys; and he begged his son to tell him another miracle, for he was sure that Joseph had not told him the last one. Joseph pleaded that there was no use relating miracles to one who only believed in ancient miracles, a statement that Dan combated, saying that one could like a story for its own sake. Like a Gentile, Joseph interposed gaily, bringing all the same a cloud into his father's face, which he would have liked to disperse with the relation of another miracle, but he continued to plead that he had told all his stories. There was, however, a certain faint-heartedness in his pleading, and Dan became more certain than ever that his son was holding back a miracle, and becoming suddenly curious, he declared that Joseph had no right to hold back a story from him, for to do that provoked argument, and argument fatigued him.

Joseph thought the device to extort a story from him, which he did not wish to tell, a shabby one, but, fearing to vex his father in his present state of health, he began to think it would be better to tell him the miracle he had heard of that morning at Capernaum; but, still loath, he tried instead to divert his father's attention from Jesus, reminding him of the numerous matters that would have to be settled up between them, especially Dan's responsibility in the new adventure, the transport of grain from Moab to Jerusalem. Dan's curiosity was not to be diverted, and seeing him give way to his rage like a petulant child, Joseph decided that he must tell him, and he began with a disparagement of his story, the truth of which he did not vouch for. At Capernaum they were all telling how some two or three weeks ago Jesus heard God speaking within him, and, naming those he wished to accompany him, led them through the woods, up the slow ascending hills in silence, no word being exchanged between him and them. Every one of the disciples was aware that the Master was in communion with his Father in heaven, and that his communion was shared by them as long as a word was not spoken. A word would break it; and so they journeyed with their eyes set upon the stars or upon the ground, never daring to look for Jesus, who remained amongst them for an hour or more and then seemed to them to pass into shadow, only his voice remaining with them bidding them to journey on, which they did, each man in his faith, until they reached a lonely hill on the top of which stood a blighted tree. Why, Master, they asked, have you led us hither? and, receiving no answer, they looked round for Jesus, but he was missing, and, thinking they walked too fast and had left him on the road behind them, they returned to the place where he had last spoken to them; and, not finding him there, they returned to the hill-top, and, seeing him among the white branches waiting for them, they knelt and prayed. When the stars began to grow dim they heard a voice cry out: behold he is with you, he who brings salvation to all men, Jew and Gentile; and ye twelve are bidden to carry the joyful tidings to the ends of the earth.

At these words the disciples rose from their knees and looked round astonished, for only four had gone with Jesus up the hillside, but twelve were kneeling at the foot of the tree, and the four that had come with Jesus knew not how the eight were gathered with them, nor could the eight tell how they reached the hill-top, nor what spirit guided them thither. The day is breaking, someone said; and looking towards the east they saw innumerable angels and all of them singing hosanna; hosannas fell from the skies and blossoms from the tree; for the tree was no longer a blighted but a quickened tree. Jesus was amongst them, talking to them, telling those who were standing around him that they were chosen by his Father in heaven first of all, and then by him, to carry the joyful tidings to the ends of the earth, and they all answered: we heard the words that thou hast spoken, Master. And he answered: ye have heard truly, and I am here to carry out my Father's will; ye shall go forth and bring salvation to all, Jew and Gentile alike.

Father, of what art thou thinking—that the twelve slept and dreamed? But before Dan could find an answer to his son's question Joseph sank away into regrets that he had acceded to his father's request and told him this last miracle, and that he had not been able to disguise the fact, in the telling, that Jesus had chosen as his apostles those who accompanied him into the mountains. He intended to omit all mention of this election, but it slipped from him unawares in the excitement of the telling, and now to divert his father's thoughts from the unfortunate admission Joseph called to one of the parrots and spoke cheerfully to the bird, and to the monkey that came hopping across the sward and jumped into his arms; but Dan knew his son's face too well to be deceived by the poor show Joseph could paint upon it, and guessing that his father divined the truth, words deserted him altogether. He sat striving against regret and hoping that his father did not think he loved him less than he loved Jesus. At last something had to be said, and Dan could find nothing better to say than: Joseph, there is gloom in thy face; but be not afraid to tell me if thou art disappointed that thou wert not with Jesus when his Father spoke to him out of heaven, and thereby missed being among the apostles. For this suspicion Joseph rebuked his father, but as it was his dearest wish to be numbered amongst the apostles his rebukes were faint, and feeling he was making bad worse, he put as bold a face upon it as he could, saying to his father that he would have liked to have been numbered among the twelve, but since it did not befall he was content; and to himself that he was younger than any that were elected, and if one of them were to die he would be called to fill his place.

So much admission was forced upon him, for it was important that his father should accept his absence from the mountain that day as a sufficient reason for his not having been elected an apostle, the real reason being, not his absence from the mountain, but the fact that he chose to turn aside from Jesus and leave him to attend his father's sick-bed. That was the sin he was judged guilty of, an unpardonable act in Jesus' mind, and one that discredited Joseph for ever, proving him for good and all to be unworthy to follow Jesus, which might be no more than the truth. He could follow Jesus' way of thinking, apprehending it remotely; but to his father, Jesus present teaching, that one must learn to hate one's father and one's mother, one's wife and one's children before one can love God, would be incomprehensible; and he would be estranged from Jesus for ever, as many of the disciples had been that morning by such ultra-idealism. It would have been better to have withheld the miracle, he said to himself, and then he lost himself thinking how the election of the apostles had dropped from him, for it had nothing to do with the miracle, and then awakening a little from his reverie he assured himself that his father must never know, for Dan could never understand Jesus in his extravagant moods. But if some accident should bring the knowledge to his father? It wasn't likely that this could happen, for who knew it? Hardly was it known among those whom he had met that morning as he crossed the Plain of Gennesaret. He had seen the disciples with Jesus, Jesus walking ahead with Peter and with James and John, to whom he addressed not a word, the others following him shamefacedly at a little distance. One of his black moods is upon him, Joseph said to himself, and gliding in among the crowd he questioned the nearest to him, who happened to be Judas, who told him that Jesus didn't know for certain if he were called to go to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Tabernacles. The Master foresees his death in Jerusalem, but he is not sure if it be ordained for this year or the next. Peter would dissuade him, he added, and in the midst of his wonderment Joseph heard from Judas that Jesus had elected his apostles, and now Joseph remembered how, speaking out of his heart, he uttered a little cry and said: it was because I am a rich man that he didn't think of me. But Judas answered that there might be another reason, to which he replied: there can be no other reason except the simple one—I wasn't there and he didn't think of me. But Judas murmured that there might be another reason—he never allows a disciple to desert him, whatever reason may be for so doing. But there was no desertion on my part. My father's illness! Wait in any case, Judas had said, till the Master has fallen out of his mood, for he is in his blackest now; we dare not speak to him. But I couldn't believe that that could make any difference, Joseph said to himself, and he put the monkey away from him somewhat harshly, and fell to thinking how he ran to Jesus, his story on his lips. But it all seemed to drift away from him the moment he looked upon Jesus, so changed was he from the Jesus he had seen in the cenoby, a young man of somewhat stern countenance and cold and thin, with the neck erect, walking with a measured gait, whose eyes were cold and distant, though they could descend from their starry heights and rest for a moment almost affectionately on the face of a mortal. That was two years ago. And the Jesus whom he met in rags by the lake-side one evening and journeyed with as far as Cæsarea Philippi, to Tyre and Sidon, was no doubt very different from the severe young man he had seen in the monastery. He had grown older, more careworn, but the first Jesus still lingered in the second, whereas the Jesus he was looking at now was a new Jesus, one whom he had seen never before; the cheeks were fallen in and the eyes that he remembered soft and luminous were now concentrated; a sort of malignant hate glowered in them: he seemed to hate all he looked upon; and his features seemed to have enlarged, the nose and chin were more prominent, and the body was shrunken. A sword that is wearing out its scabbard was the thought that passed through Joseph's frightened mind; and frightened at the change in Jesus' appearance, and still more by the words that were hurled out at him, when intimidated and trembling, he babbled out: my father lay between life and death for eight days and came out of his swoon slowly. He could say no more, the rest of his story was swallowed up in a violent interruption, Jesus telling him that there was no place among his followers for those who could not free themselves from such ghosts as father, mother and children and wife.

Jesus had flung his father's wealth and his own in his face, and his own pitiful understanding that had not been able to see that this world and the world to come were not one thing but twain. And whosoever chooses this world must remain satisfied with its fleshly indulgences and its cares and its laws and responsibilities, and whoso ever chooses the Kingdom of Heaven must cast this world far from him, must pluck it, as it were, out of his heart and throw it away, bidding it depart; for it is but a ghost. All these, he said, pointing to his apostles, have cast their ghosts into the lake. The apostles stood with eyes fixed, for they did not understand how they had despoiled themselves of their ghosts, and only Peter ventured into words: all my family is in the lake, Master; and at his simplicity Jesus smiled, then as if to compensate him for his faith he said: I shall come in a chariot sitting on the right hand of our Father, the Judgment Book upon my lap. As the rocks of this world are shaken and riven by earthquakes, my words shall sunder father from son, brother from brother, daughter from mother; the ties that have been held sacred shall be broken and all the things looked upon as eternal shall pass away even as the Temple of Jerusalem shall pass away. My words shall sunder it Beam by beam, pillar by pillar, and every stone of it shall be scattered. For I say unto you that God is weary of the fat of rams and goats, and incense delights his nostrils; it is not our flocks and herds that our Father desires nor the sweet-smelling herbs of this world, but a temple in which there shall be nothing but the love of God. It is for the building of this temple that I have been called hither; and not with hands during laborious years will it be built, but at once, for the temple that I speak to you of, is in the heart of every man; and woe, woe, woe, I say unto you who delay to build this temple, for the fulfilment of the prophecies is at hand, and when the last day of this world begins to dawn and the dead rise up seeking their cere-clothes it will be too late. Woe! woe! woe! unto thee, Chorazin, Bethsaida and Magdala, for you have not repented yet, but still choose the ghosts that haunt the sepulchres out of which ye shall be called soon; too soon for many; for I say unto you that it is not the dead that sleep but the living. At these words there were murmurings among the disciples, and they said, turning from one to the other: he says we sleep, brother, but this is not true. He mocks at us. But Jesus, as if he did not hear these rebukers, and moved as if by a sudden sympathy for Joseph, said: here is one that left me to attend his father's sick-bed, but I would have you understand me in this, that if we would love God we must abandon father, mother, wife and children, for there is not room in our hearts for two loves. Ye say that I lay heavy burdens on your backs, but I say unto you that I lay no burdens on your backs that I did not first weigh upon my own shoulders; for have I not denied myself brothers and sisters, and did I not say to my mother, who came to dissuade me: God chose thee as a vehicle to give to man a redeemer to lead him out of this kingdom of clay. Thou hast done it and so there is no further need of thee. Out of this corruptible body I shall rise in Jerusalem, my mission accomplished, into the incorruptible spirit. His passion rising again and into flood, he seemed like one bereft of reason, for he said that all men must drink of his blood if they would live for ever. He who licked up one drop would have everlasting life. Joseph recalled the murmurings that followed these words, but Jesus would not desist. These murmurings seemed to sting him to declare his doctrine to the full, and he added that his flesh, too, was like bread, and that any crumb would give to him who ate it a place before the throne of the Almighty. Whereupon many withdrew, murmuring more loudly than before, saying among themselves: who is this man that asks us to assuage our thirst with his blood and our hunger with his flesh? Moses and Elijah did not ask such things. Who is he that says he will scatter the Temple to build up another?

Many other animadversions Joseph remembered among the multitude, and he recalled them one by one, pondering over each till one of the monkeys sprang into his arms and snatched some flowers out of his hand and hobbled away shrieking, awaking Dan, who had been dozing, and who, seeing whence the shrieking came, closed his eyes again. While his father slept Joseph remembered that Peter, John and James stood by the Master throughout the dissidence. But what answer will they give, Joseph asked himself, when they are questioned as to what the Master meant when he said that they must drink his blood and eat his flesh? What answer will they make when the people question them in the different countries?—for they are to go to every part of the world, carrying the joyful tidings. It seemed to Joseph that the apostles would be able to make plain these hard sayings even less well than he, and he could not make plain to anybody what the Master had meant, and still less would he be able to convince others that the Master had said well that a man must leave his father though he were dying. He said that he should leave his father unburied, the dead not needing our care, for they are the living ones, and the hyenas and crows would find to eat only that which had always been dead. Of course if the old world were going out and the new coming in, it mattered very little what happened within the next twenty-four hours. But was the new world as near as that? He wondered! It might be nearer still without his being able to leave his father to die among strangers, and a feeling rose up within him that he knew he would never be able to subdue though he were to gain an eternity of happiness by subduing it; and, pursuing this thread of thought, he came to the conclusion that he was a very weak creature, neither sufficiently enamoured of this world nor of the next; so he supposed Jesus was right to discard him, for, as he knew himself, he would be an insufficient apostle, just as he was an insufficient son. But his father did not think him a bad son. He raised his eyes, and, finding his father's eyes upon him, he remembered that he had left him because he wished to see the world, to go to Jerusalem, to live with the Essenes, to go to Egypt; and that he had remained away for nearly two years, and had returned to settle a business matter between himself and his father. Therefore it was not love of his father but a business matter that brought him back from Egypt; and now he was going to leave his father again, though he knew that his father wished him to marry some lusty girl, who would bear healthy children.

If he were a good son he would take a maid to bed. But that he couldn't do! I am afraid, he said, speaking suddenly out of his thoughts, I'm not the son you deserve, Father. I'm not a bad son, but I'm not the son God should have given you. Thou shouldst not say that, Joseph, for we have loved each other dearly. It is true that I hoped to see little children about me, and it may be that hope will never be fulfilled, which is sad to think on. I've never seen thee over-busy with one of our serving girls, nor caught thee near her bed, and the family will end with, thee, and the counting-house will end with me, and these things will happen through no fault of mine or thine, Joseph. Our lives are not planned by ourselves, and when life comes sweetly to a man a bitter death awaits him, for death is bitter to those that have lived in ease and health as I have done. I am still obdurate, for I can sit down to a meal with pleasure, but a time will come when I shall not be able to do this, and then the sentence that the Lord pronounced over all flesh will seem easy to bear, and the grandchildren I have not gotten will be desired no longer; only the peace of the grave, where there is no questioning nor dainties. But, Father, this world is but the shadow of a reality beyond the grave, and I beseech you to believe in your eternity and in mine. In the eternity of my body or of my soul—which, Joseph? Thou knowest not, but of this we are sure, that there is little time left for me to love you in this comfortable land of Galilee. And, this being so, I will ask you to promise me that thou wilt not leave Judea in my lifetime. Thou'lt have to go to Jerusalem, for business awaits you there, and to Jericho, perhaps, which is a long way from Galilee, but I'd not have thee leave Judea to preach a strange creed to the Gentiles. I know no reason now, Father, for me to leave Judea, since I am not among the chosen. If thou hadst been, Joseph, thou wouldst not have left me in these last years of my life? Jesus is dear to thee, but he isn't thy father, and every father would like his son to be by him when the Lord chooses to call him. I would have thee within a day's journey or two; death comes quicker than that sometimes, but we must risk something. I'd have thee remain in Judea so that thou mayest come, if thou art called, to receive my last blessing. I'd have thee close my eyes, Joseph. The children I'll forgive thee, if thou wilt promise me this. I promise it, Father, and will hold to my promise if I live beyond thee. If thou livest beyond me, Joseph? Of course thou wilt live many years after me. But, Joseph, I would have thee shun dangerous company. And guessing that his father had Jesus in his mind, Joseph asked him if it were so, and he answered that it was so, saying that Jesus was no new thing in Judea, and that the priests and the prophets have ever been in strife. That is my meaning, he said. The exactions of the priests weigh heavily, and Jesus is right in this much, that priests always have been, and perhaps always will be, oppressors of the poor; they are strong, and have many hirelings about them. Thou hast heard of the Zealots, Son, who walk in the streets of Jerusalem, their hands on their knives, following those who speak against the law and the traditions, and who, when they meet them, put their knives into their ribs, and when the murdered man falls back into their arms call aloud for help? So do the priests free themselves from their opponents, and, my good son, Joseph, think what my grief would be if I were to receive tidings that thou hadst been slain in the streets. Dost think that the news would not slay me as quickly as any knife? I ask little of thee, Joseph, the children I'll forgo, but do thou separate thyself from these sectaries during my lifetime. Think of me receiving the news of thy death; an old man living alone among all his riches without hope of any inheritance of his name. But, Joseph, I can't put away altogether the hope that the day will come when thou'lt look more favourably on a maid than now. Thy thoughts be all for Jesus, his teaching, and his return to this world, sitting by the side of his Father in a fiery chariot, but maybe the day will come when these hopes will fade away and thy eyes will rest upon a maid. It is strange that thou shouldst be so unlike me. I was warmer-blooded at thy age, and when I saw thy mother——Father, the promise is given to thee already, and my hand upon it. I'll not see Jesus during thy life. If the sudden news of my death were to kill thee, I should be thy murderer. Jesus will forgive thee these few years, Dan said. The expression on Joseph's face changed, and Dan wondered if Jesus were so cruel, so hard, and so self-centred that he would not grant his son a few years, if he were to ask it, so that he might stay by his father's bedside and close his eyes and bury him. It seemed from Joseph's face that Jesus asked everything from his disciples, and if they did not give everything it was as if they gave nothing.

And while Dan was thus conferring with his own thoughts he heard Joseph saying that if he were to keep the promise he had just given, not to see Jesus again, he must not remain in his neighbourhood. Yes, that is so, Joseph; go to Jerusalem. And the old man began to babble of the transport of figs from Jericho, till Joseph could not do else than ponder on the grip of habit on a man's heart, and ask himself if the news of his death would affect his father's health more than the news that there was no further demand in Damascus for his salt fish. He repented the thought as soon as it had passed through his mind, and he understood that, however much it would cost him, he must go away to Jerusalem. He dared not risk the accusation that would for ever echo in his heart: my father has no peace by day, nor rest at night, he is thinking always that a Zealot's knife is in my back. But after my father's death—His thoughts brought him back again to a sudden shame of himself. I am like that, he said, and shall always be as I am. And, not daring to think of himself any more, he jumped to his feet: I must tell my servant that I shall start soon after daybreak.

CHAP. XVI.

And on his arrival in Jerusalem Joseph stood for a moment before his camel thanking the beast for his great, rocking stride, which has given me, he said, respite from thinking for two whole days and part of two nights. But I cannot be always on the back of a camel, he continued, and must now rely on my business to help me to forget; and he strove to apply his mind to every count that came before him, but in the middle of every one his thoughts would fly away to Galilee, and the merchant waiting to receive the provisions he had come to fetch wondered of what the young man was thinking, and the cause of the melancholy that was in his face.

He was still less master of his thoughts when he sat alone, his ledger before him; and finding he could not add up the figures, he would abandon himself without restraint to his grief; and very often it was so deep that when the clerk opened the door it took Joseph some moments to remember that he was in his counting-house; and when the clerk spoke of the camel-drivers that were waiting in the yard behind the counting-house for orders, it was only by an effort of will that he collected his thoughts sufficiently to realise that the yard was still there, and that a caravan was waiting for orders to return to Jericho. The orders were forgotten on the way to the yard, and the clerk had to remind him, and sometimes to say: Master, if you'll allow me, I will settle this business for you.

Joseph was glad of his clerk's help, and he returned to the ledger, and, staring at figures which he did not see, he sat thinking of Jesus, of the night they walked by the lake's edge, of the day spent in the woods above Capernaum, and the various towns of Syria that they visited. It seemed to him that the good days had gone over for ever, and it was but a sad pleasure to remember the pagans that liked Jesus' miracles without being able to abandon their own gods. Only Peter could bring a smile into his face; a smile wandered round his lips, for it was impossible to think of Peter and not to smile. But the smile faded quickly and the old pain gripped his heart.

I have lost Jesus for ever, he said, and at that moment a sudden rap at his door awoke him from his reveries. He was angry with his clerk, but he tried to disguise his anger, for he was conscious that he must present a very ridiculous appearance to his clerk, unless, indeed, which was quite likely, his clerk was indifferent to anything but the business of the counting-house. Be this as it may, he was an old and confidential servant who made no comments and asked no questions. Joseph was grateful to his clerk for his assumed ignorance and an hour later Joseph bade him good-night. I shall see thee in the morning, to which Samuel answered: yes, sir; and Joseph was left alone in the crowded street of Jerusalem, staring at the passengers as they went, wondering if they were realities, everyone compelled by a business or a desire, or merely shadows, figments of his imagination and himself no more than a shadow, a something that moved and that must move across the valley of Jehoshaphat and up the Mount of Olives. Why that way more than any other way? he asked himself: because it is the shortest way. As if that mattered, he added, and as soon as he reached the top of the Mount of Olives he looked over the desert and was surprised by the smallness of the hills; like the people who lived among them, they seemed to him to have dwindled. The world is much smaller than I thought, he said. That is it, the world seems to have dwindled into a sort of ash-heap; life has become as tasteless as ashes. It can only end, he said to himself, by my discovering something that interests me, but nothing interests me except Jesus. Lack of desire, he said, is my burden, for, desiring one thing too much, I have lost desire for all else, and that is why life has come to me like an ash-heap.

As the days went by he began to feel life more oppressive and unendurable, till one evening the thought crossed his mind that change of scene might be a great benefit to him. If he were to go to Egypt, he would journey for fifteen days through the desert, the rocking stride of the camel would keep him from thinking, and he might arrive in Egypt eager to listen to the philosophers again. But the temptations that Egypt presented faded almost as soon as they had arisen, and he deemed that it might be better for him to choose a city oversea. A sea voyage, he thought, will cheer me more than a long journey across the desert, and Joppa is but a day's journey from Jerusalem. But the shipping is more frequent from Cæsarea, and it is not as far; and for a moment it seemed to him that he would like to be on board a ship watching the wind making the sail beautiful. But to what port should he be making for? he asked. Why not to Greece?—for there are philosophers as great or greater than those of Alexandria. But philosophers are out of my humour, he added, and, putting Athens aside, he bethought himself of Corinth, and the variegated world he would meet there. From every port ships come to Corinth, bringing different habits, customs, languages, religions; and for the better part of the evening Corinth seemed to be his destination.

Corinth was famous for its courtesans, and he remembered suddenly that the most celebrated were collected there; and it may have been the courtesans that kept him from this journey, and his thoughts turning from vice to marriage a bitterness rose up in his mind against his father for the persistency with which Dan reminded him in and out of season that every man's duty is to bring children into the world.

It had seemed to him that in asking him to take a wife to his discomfort his father was asking him too much, and he had put the question aside; but he was now without will to resist any memory that might befall him, and for the first time he allowed his thoughts to dwell on his father's implied regret that he had never caught his son near a servant girl's bed. His unwillingness to impugn his father's opinions kept him heretofore from pondering on his words, but feeling his life to be now broken and cast away, there seemed to arise some reasons for an examination of his father's words. They could not mean anything else than that a young man was following the natural instincts if he lingered about a young girl's room; and that to be without this instinct was almost a worse misfortune than to be possessed by it to the practical exclusion of other interests.

His father, it is true, may have argued the matter out with himself somewhat in this fashion: that love of women in a man may be controlled; and looking back into his own life he may have found this view confirmed. Joseph remembered that his grandmother often spoke to him of Dan's great love of his wife, and it might be that he had never loved another woman; few men, however, were as fortunate as his father, and Joseph could not help thinking that it were better to put women out of his mind altogether than to become inflamed by the sight of every woman. He believed that was why he had always kept all thoughts of women out of his mind; but it seemed to him now that a wife would break the monotony that he saw in front of him, and were he to meet a woman such as his father seems to have met he might take her to live with him. He thought of himself as her husband, though he was by no means sure that married life was a possible makeshift for the life he sought and was obliged to forgo, but as life seemed an obligation from which he could not reasonably escape he thought he would like to share it with some woman who would give him children. His father desired grandchildren, and since he had partly sacrificed his life for his father's sake, he might, it seemed to him, sacrifice himself wholly. But could he? That did not depend altogether on himself, and with the view to discovering the turn of his sex instinct he called to mind all the women he had seen, asking himself as each rose up before him if he could marry her. There were some that seemed nearer to his desire than others, and it was with the view to honourable marriage that he called upon his friends, and his father's friends, and passed his eyes over all their daughters; but the girl whose image had lingered more pleasantly than any other in his memory had married lately, and all the others inspired only a physical aversion which he felt none would succeed in overcoming. He had seen some Greek women, and been attracted in a way, for they were not too like their sex; but these Jewish women—the women of his race—seemed to him as gross in their minds as in their bodies, and it surprised him to find that though many men seemed to think as he did about these women, they were not repelled as he was, but accepted them willingly, even greedily, as instruments of pleasure and afterwards as mothers of children. But I am not as these men are, he said; my father must bear his sorrow like another; and in meditation it seemed to him that it would not be reasonable that his father should get everything he desired and his son nothing.

His father had gotten more out of life than ever he should get; he would have his son till he died (so far as he could he would secure him that satisfaction), and after death this world and its shows concern us not. But it may well be that we die out of one life to be born into another life, that everything that passes is replaced by an equivalent, he said, repeating the words of a Greek philosopher to whom he had been much addicted in happy days gone by, and that reality is but an eternal shaping and reshaping of things. All that is beyond doubt, he continued, is that things pass too quickly for us to have any certain knowledge of them, our only standard being our own flitting impressions; and as all men bring a different sensitiveness into the world, knowledge is a word without meaning, for there can be no knowledge. Every race is possessed of a different sensitiveness, he said, as he passed up the Mount of Olives on his way home. We ask for miracles, but the Greeks are satisfied with reason. Am I Greek or Jew? he asked, for he was looking forward to some silent hours with a book of Greek philosophy and hoped to forget himself in the manuscript. But he could not always keep his thoughts on the manuscript, and, forgetful of Heraclitus, he often sat thinking of Jesus' promise—that one morning men would awake to find that God had come to judge the world and divide it among those that repented their sins. He remembered he had forfeited his share in the Kingdom for his father's sake, or had he been driven out of the community because his belief in the coming of the Kingdom was insufficient? It is true that his belief had wavered, but he had always believed. Even his natural humility, of which he was conscious, did not allow him to doubt that his belief in Jesus was less fervid than that of Peter, James, John and the residue. The conviction was always quick in him that he felt more deeply than these publicans and fishers, yet Jesus retained them and sent him away.

The manuscript glided from his hand to the floor, and his thoughts wandered back to Alexandria, and he sat thinking that death must be rather the beginning than the end of things, for it were impossible to believe that life was an end in itself. Heraclitus was right: his present life could be nothing else but the death of another life. And as if to enforce this doctrine a recollection of his grandmother intruded upon his meditation. She was seventy-eight when she died, and her intellect must have faded some months before, but with her passing one of the servants told him that a curious expression came into her face—a sort of mocking expression, as if she had learnt the truth at last and was laughing at the dupes she left behind. She lay in a grave in Galilee, under some pleasant trees, and while thinking of her grave it occurred to him that he would not like to be put into the earth; his fancy favoured a tomb cut out of the rocks in Mount Scropas, for there, he said to himself, I shall be far from the Scribes and Pharisees, and going out on the terrace he stood under the cedars and watched for an hour the outlines of the humped hills that God had driven in endless disorder, like herds of cattle, all the way to Jericho, thinking all the while that it would be pleasant to lie out of hearing of all the silly hurly-burly that we call life. But the hurly-burly would not be silly if Jesus were by him, and he asked himself if Jesus was an illusion like all the rest, and as soon as the pain the question provoked had died away, his desire of a tomb took possession of him again, and it left him no peace, but led him out of the house every evening, up a zigzagging path along the hillside till he came to some rocks over against the desert. I shall lie in quiet here till he calls me, on a couch embedded in the wall and surmounted by an arch—but if he should prefer me to rise out of an humble grave? That I may not know, only that the poorest is not as unhappy as I, so I may as well have a tomb to my liking.

It was a long time since he had come to a resolve, and having come to one at last, he was happier. And in more cheerful mood he decided that now that the site was settled it would be well to seek information as to which are the best workmen to employ on the job.

But for him whose thoughts run on death nothing is harder to settle than where his bones shall lie; and next time he visited the hillside Joseph came upon rocks facing eastward, and it seemed to him that the rays of the rising sun should fall on his sepulchre; but a few days later, coming out of his house in great disquiet, it seemed to him he would lie happy if his tomb were visited every evening by the peaceful rays of the setting sun, and he asked himself how many years of life he would have to drag through before God released him from his prison. If he wished to die he could, for our lives are in our own hands. But he did not know that he cared to die and, overpowered with grief, he abandoned himself to metaphysical speculation, asking himself again if it were not true that to be born into this world meant to pass out of one life into another; therefore, if so, to die in this world only meant to pass into another, a life unknown to us, for all is unknown—nothing being fixed or permanent. We cannot bathe twice in the same river, so Heraclitus said, but we cannot bathe even once in the same river, he added; and to carry the master's thought a stage further was a pleasure, if any moment of his present life could be called pleasurable. He heard these sayings first in Alexandria, and, looking towards Jerusalem, he tried to recall the exact words of the sage regarding the futility of sacrifice. Our priests try, said Heraclitus, to purify themselves with blood and we admire them, but if a filthy man were to roll himself in the mud in the hope of cleaning himself we should think he was mad. In some such wise Heraclitus spoke, but it seemed to Joseph he had lost something of the spirit of the saying in too profuse wording of it. As he sought for the original epitome he heard his name called, and awaking from his recollections of Alexandria he looked up and saw before him a young man whom he remembered having seen at the Sanhedrin. Nicodemus was his name; and he remembered how the fellow had kept his eyes on him for one whole evening, trying at various times to engage him in talk; an insistent fellow who, despite rebuffs, had followed him into the street after the meeting, and, refusing to be shaken off, had led the way so skilfully that Joseph found himself at last on Nicodemus' doorstep and with no option but to accept Nicodemus' invitation to enter. He did not like the fellow, but not on account of his insistence; it was not his insistence that had prejudiced him against him as much as the young man's elaboration of raiment, his hairdressing above all; he wore curls on either side that must have taken his barber a long while to prepare, and he exhaled scents. He wore bracelets, and from his appearance Joseph had not been able to refrain from imagining lascivious pictures on the walls of his house and statues in the corners of the rooms—in a word, he thought he had been persuaded to enter an ultra-Greek house.

In this he was, however, mistaken, and in the hour they spent together his host's thoughts were much less occupied than Joseph expected them to be with the jewels on his neck and his wrists, and the rich tassels on his sash. He talked of many things, but his real thoughts were upon arms; and he showed Joseph scimitars and daggers. Despite a long discussion on the steel of Damascus, Joseph could not bring himself to believe that Nicodemus' interests in heroic warfare were more than intellectual caprice: and he regarded as entirely superficial Nicodemus' attacks on the present-day Jews, whose sloth and indolence he reproved, saying that they had left the heroic spirit brought out of Arabia with their language, on the banks of the Euphrates. One hero, he admitted, they had produced in modern times (Judas Maccabeus), and Joseph heard for the first time that this great man always had addressed his soldiers in Hebrew. All the same he did not believe that Nicodemus was serious in his passionate demands for the Hebrew language, which had not been spoken since the Jews emerged from the pastoral stage. We should do well, Nicodemus said, to engage others to look to our flocks and herds, so that we may have leisure to ponder the texts of Talmud, nor do I hesitate to condemn my own class, the Sadducees, as the least worthy of all; for we look upon the Temple as a means of wealth, despising the poor people, who pay their half-shekel and bring their rams and their goats and bullocks hither.

He could talk for a long time in this way, his eyes abstracted from Joseph, fixed on the darkness of the room. While listening to him Joseph had often asked himself if there were a real inspiration behind that lean face, carven like a marble, with prominent nose and fading chin, or if he were a mere buffoon.

He succeeded in provoking a casual curiosity in Joseph, but he had not infected Joseph with any desire of his acquaintance; his visits to the counting-house had not been returned. Yet this meeting on the hillside was not altogether unwelcome, and Joseph, to his surprise, surveyed the young man's ringlets and bracelets with consideration; he admired his many weapons, and listened to him with interest. He talked well, telling that the sword that hung from his thigh was from Damascus and recommending a merchant to Joseph who could be trusted to discover as fine a one for him. It was not wise to go about this lonely hillside unarmed, and Joseph was moved to ask him to draw the sword from its scabbard, which Nicodemus was only too glad to do, calling Joseph's attention to the beautiful engraving on the blade, and to the hilt studded with jewels. He drew a dagger from his jacket, a hardly less costly weapon, and Joseph was too abashed to speak of his buckler on his left arm and the spear that he held in his right hand. But, nothing loath, Nicodemus bubbled into explanation. It was part of his project to remind his fellow-countrymen that they too must arm themselves if they ever wished to throw off the Roman yoke.

So long as the Romans substitute a Hebrew word or letter for the head of Tiberius on the coin we pay the tribute willingly, he said as they followed the crooked path through the rocks up the hillside towards Joseph's house. And in reply to Joseph, who asked him if he believed in the coming end of the world, he answered that he did, but he interpreted the coming end of the world to mean the freeing of the people of Israel from the Roman yoke, astonishing Joseph by the vigour of his reply; for Joseph was not yet sure which was the truer part of this young man, the ringlets and the bracelets or the shield and the spear.

He was partial to long silences; and the next of these was so long that Joseph had begun to wonder, but when they reached the crest of the hill he burst into speech like a bird into song, asking what was happening in Galilee, avouching much interest in Jesus, whom he had heard of, but had never seen. Joseph, guessing that it was to obtain news of Jesus that Nicodemus sought him on the hillside, told him that he had not spoken of Jesus for many weeks, and found a sudden relief in relating all he knew about him: how Jesus said that father, mother, brother and sister must be abandoned. Yes, he had said, we must look upon all sacrifice as naught if we would obtain our ancient kingdom and language. But the Essenes have never spoken like that, Nicodemus urged: he is not an Essene, nor Moses, nor Elijah, nor Jeremiah. He is none of these: he is Judas Maccabeus come to life again: and henceforth I shall look upon myself as his disciple.

He spoke so loudly that any passer-by might have caught up his words; and there was danger from Joseph's servants, for they were now standing by his gate. He looked round uneasily, and as Nicodemus showed no signs of taking leave of him, he thought it would be more prudent to ask him into the house, warning him, however, that he had no beautiful things to show him in the way of engraved weapons, swords from Damascus or daggers from Circassia. It was not, however, to see beautiful weapons that Nicodemus inclined; only so far as they related to Jesus was he interested in arms; and he besought Joseph to tell him more of Jesus, whom he seemed to have already accepted as the leader of a revolt against the Romans. But Joseph, who had begun to fear the young man, protested that Jesus' Kingdom was not of this earth, thinking thereby to discredit Jesus in Nicodemus' eyes. Nicodemus was not to be put off so easily: the Jews spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven so that they might gain the kingdom of earth. A method not very remarkable for its success, Joseph interposed. The Romans do otherwise, never thinking about the Kingdom of Heaven, but only of riches and vainglory, whereas Jesus, he said, says it is as hard for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as it would be for a sword to pass through the eye of a needle. A sword through the eye of a needle, Nicodemus repeated, walking up and down the floor, stamping his lance as he went. He is the leader we have been waiting for. But it is not always thus that he speaks, Joseph interposed, I have heard him myself say: it is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as it would be for a cow to calve in a rook's nest. As he went to and fro Nicodemus muttered: there is much to be said for this revision of his words. Jesus wishes to reach the imagination of the poor that know not swords. And he spoke for a long time of the indolence of the rich, of their gross pleasures and sensual indulgences. But we must give them swords, he added under his breath, as if he were speaking for himself alone and did not wish Joseph to hear, and then, awaking from his reverie, he turned to his host: tell me more of this remarkable man. And Joseph, who was now a little amused at his guest's extravagances, asked him if he knew the answer he had given to Antipas, who had invited him to his court in Tiberias in consequence of the renown of his miracles. Wishing to witness some exhibition of his skill, Antipas seated himself in imperial fashion on his highest throne, and, drawing his finest embroideries about him, asked Jesus if he had seen anybody attired so beautifully before, to which Jesus, who stood between two soldiers, a beggar in rags, before the king, replied: I have indeed; pheasants and peacocks, for nature apparelled them. Neither Moses nor Elijah nor Jeremiah, Nicodemus declared, could have invented a reply more apt. He asked Joseph if any further doubt lingered in his mind that Jesus was the prophet promised to the Jews. How I envy thy intercourse with him, he cried. How I envy thee, for thou art the friend of him that will overthrow the Romans.

Overthrow the Romans! Joseph repeated to himself, and as soon as his guest had left his house he was brought to a presentiment of the danger he incurred in allowing this man to come to his house: a young man who walked about extravagantly armed would, sooner or later, find himself haled before Pilate. Joseph felt that it would be better to refuse to see him if he called at the counting-house: an excuse could be found easily: his foreman might say: Master is away in Jericho. But when Nicodemus called a few weeks afterwards Joseph was constrained to tell his foreman to tell Nicodemus that he would see him. The truth was, Joseph was glad of an interruption, for his business was boring him more than it did usually, but he liked to pretend to himself that he could not escape from Nicodemus.

A new opinion of Nicodemus began to shape itself in his mind when Nicodemus said that many and many a year will have to pass before that can be done with success, and the Roman rule is so light that the people feel it not. It saves us from quarrels among ourselves, and who have quarrelled as bitterly as we have done? Joseph's heart softened at this appreciation of the Jewish people, and they began to talk in sympathy for the first time, and it was a pleasure to find themselves in this agreement, that before the Jews could conquer the Romans they would have to conquer themselves. He is more cautious than I thought for, Joseph muttered as he returned to his camel-drivers, for his guest had departed suddenly without giving any reason for his visitation. A spy he cannot be, Joseph said to himself. I stand too well with Pilate to be suspected of schemes of mutiny. But he will soon come under the notice of Pilate; and Joseph was not surprised when Pilate asked him if he knew an extravagantly dressed young man, Nicodemus by name. Joseph replied that he did, giving Pilate to understand that Nicodemus was no more than one of the many eccentrics to be found in every city, with a taste for the beauty of engraved swords, and little for the use of these weapons; and Pilate, who seemed to be of the same opinion himself, suddenly asked him if he had ever met in Galilee one named Jesus. Jesus from Nazareth, Pilate said; and Joseph watched the tall, handsome, pompous Roman, one of those intelligently stupid men of which there are so many about. He arrived, Pilate continued, in Jerusalem yesterday with a number of Galileans, all talking of the resurrection, and news has just reached me that he had been preaching in the Temple, creating some disturbance, which will, I hope, not be repeated, for disturbances in the Temple lead to disturbances in the streets. Does your father know this new prophet? As Joseph was about to answer one of Pilate's apparitors entered suddenly with papers that demanded the procurator's attention. We will talk over this on another occasion, Pilate said as he bent over the papers, and Joseph went out muttering: so he has come, so he has come to Jerusalem at last.

At any moment he might meet Jesus, and to stop to speak to him in the street would, in a sense, involve a profanation of his oath to his father; and he knew he could not turn aside from Jesus. He must therefore refrain from going up to Jerusalem and transact his business from his house by means of messengers. But if Pilate were to send for him? We cannot altogether avoid risk, he said to himself. I can do no more than remain within doors.

It was not many days afterwards that one of his servants came suddenly into the room. Nicodemus, Sir, is waiting in the hall and would see you, though I told him you were engaged with business. He says the matter on which he is come to speak to you is important. Well, then, let me see him, Joseph answered.

Now, what has happened? he asked. Has he said anything that the Sanhedrin will be able to punish him for? He threw some more olive roots on the fire and told the servant to bring a lamp. A lamp, he said, will be welcome, for this grey dusk is disheartening.

The weather is cold, so draw your chair near to the fire. I am glad to see you. The men waited for the servant to leave the room. We shall be more comfortable when the curtains are drawn. The lamp, I see, is beginning to burn up.... Nicodemus sat grave and hieratic, thin and tall, in the high chair, and the gloom on his face was so immovable that Joseph wasted no words. What has fallen out? he said, and Nicodemus asked him if he knew Phinehas, the great money-changer in the Temple. Joseph nodded, and, holding his hands before the fire, Nicodemus told his story very slowly, exasperating Joseph by his slowness; but he did not dare to bid him to hasten, and, holding himself in patience, he listened to him while he told that Phinehas was perhaps the worst of the extorters, the most noisy and arrogant, a vicious and quarrelsome man, who, yester-morning, was engaged with a rich Alexandrian Jew, Shamhuth, who had lately arrived from Alexandria and was buying oxen, rams and ewes in great numbers for sacrifice. We wondered at his munificence, Nicodemus said, not being able to explain it to ourselves, for the Feast of the Tabernacles is over; and our curiosity was still more roused when it became known that he was distributing largess. The man's appearance aroused suspicion, for it is indeed a fearful one. From his single eye to his chin a fearful avariciousness fills his face, and the empty, withered socket speaks of a close, sordid, secret passion, and so clearly that Jesus said: that man has not come to glorify God nor to repent of his sins. He is guilty of a great crime, and he would have it forgiven him. But the crime? Of what crime is he guilty? we asked. Jesus did not answer us, for at that moment some young man had come to listen to him, and the man's crime appeared to him as of little importance compared to his own teaching. Has he come, we asked, to pray that his sight may be restored to him? Jesus motioned to us that that was so; and he also bade us be silent, for stories of miracles have a great hold upon the human mind, and Jesus wished to teach some young men who had come to ask him how they were to live during these last days. But myself, consumed with desire to hear the man's story, mingled with the herdsmen who had brought in the cattle, and inquired how Shamhuth had lost his eye. None could tell me, and I failed to get tidings of him till I came upon an Alexandrian Jew who told me a strange story. Shamhuth's money came from his friend's wife, whom he married after causing him to be killed by hirelings; and when his senses tired of her he persuaded her daughter to come over to him in the night. Shamhuth always walked praying aloud, his eyes cast down lest they should fall upon a woman, and his wife did not suspect him. But one night she was bidden in a dream to seek her husband, and rising from her bed she descended and opened the door very softly, not wishing to disturb him in his sleep. The sight that met her eyes kindled such a great flame of hate in her that she returned to her room for a needle, and placing her hands upon her daughter's mouth she quickly pricked out both her eyes, and then, approaching her husband, she pricked out his right eye, and was about to prick out the other, but he slid from her hands and escaped, blind of an eye, to Jerusalem, bringing with him great sums of money in the hope that he may purchase a miracle, which is a great blasphemy in itself, and shows what the man really is in his heart.

Such was the story that the Alexandrian Jew, who knew him, told us; and as soon as these abominations became known in the Temple a riot began, and somebody cried: the adulterer must be put away. Whereupon Phinehas, seeing the large profits he had expected vanishing, turned to Jesus and said: it is thou who hast brought this disaster upon me, lying Galilean, who callest thyself the son of David, when all know ye to be the son of Joseph the Carpenter.

Son of David! Son of David! How can that be? the people began to ask each other, and in the midst of their questioning a great hilarity broke over them. In great wrath Jesus overturned Phinehas' table, and Phinehas would have overthrown Jesus had not Peter, who had armed himself with a sword, raised it. The people became like mad: tables were broken for staves, some rushed away to escape with a whole skin, and the frightened cattle dashed among them, a black bull goring many. And in all the mob Jesus was the fiercest fighter, lashing the people in the face with the thongs of the whip he had taken from a herdsman, and felling others with the handle. The cages of the doves were broken, the birds took flight, and the priests, at their wits' end, called for the guards to come down from the porticoes, and it was not till much blood had been spilt that order was restored. Joseph asked how Phinehas came out of all this trouble, and heard that he had escaped without injury. Merely losing a few shekels, not more, though he deserved to lose his life, for he placed his money above the Temple, not caring whether it was polluted by the presence of an adulterer, only thinking of the great profit he could make out of the man's sins, differing in no wise in this from the priests and sacristans.

Jesus should never have gone to the Temple nor come to Jerusalem, Joseph said. But in this Nicodemus could not agree with him, for if Jesus were the Messiah his mission was nothing less than to free Jerusalem from the Roman yoke. But he should have brought a larger body of disciples with him—some thousands, instead of a few hundreds—not enough to bring about the abolition of the Temple, which, according to Nicodemus, was the Galilean's project—one more difficult to accomplish than he thinks for. The Romans support the Temple, he cried, because the Temple divides us. I say it myself, Sadducee though I am.