might be heard by the fleshly ear-the singing and the melting tubes of the tremulous water-organ; and even savored as an odor-the sweet, mysterious incense, rising up, like tangible prayer, to heaven.

Then he fingered the locket on his breast, and said: "I shall be a priest within that temple, a priest unto the Almighty. I must ever keep this locket."

But the Chazzan came in, bringing by the hand Amahnah.

He taketh the young Jew apart, and saith unto him: "See! This maiden was a foundling. Do not the Sopherim call such an one "The Child of God' But behold! I would have thee to take her for the wife of thy bosom, and to be unto thee as the promise of the Lord, for thou art meant as a priest in the temple of the Most High. For her name, which is Leah (or Labor) is it not also Amahnah, or Berith, which, in the language of our people (which was given unto us by God) signifieth 'Promise,' or 'Covenant'?"

But Samson said unto him, "I do thank thee, and bless thee. Yet is it truly needful that one should marry in great haste? I have beheld few women, and am very young. Let me, therefore, be alone awhile, and, in the course of my meditations, I may chance to think of the thing which I ought to do."

The Chazzan answered him, "My Son, my Son! I fear thou art a prodigal with time. But do as thou wilt for a season, then call back the counsel I have given thee, and look upon Amahnah, for none there is that is like unto her, either for wisdom, or for beauty, or for any good thing at all. Hast thou the locket yet? It is well. I will leave thee now, but Amahnah shall stay for a season, and see that thy house is set in order."

And the Chazzan went his way, but Amahnah remained, and Samson, as he looked upon her, beheld that she turned and looked at him. And he saw that her heart was pure, and that all her countenance was very beautiful, because the radiancy of her spirit did shine therethrough.

And about this time a company of shepherds came, with unceremonious hilarity, with pipe and with tabret, with harp and sweetest singing. And Amahnah set to work to get them entertainment, and to put much meat before them.

And when they had eaten, they went, and Samson with them, to look after the sheep. And when Samson had found his own dear flock, then the hireling shepherds went on to their pastures also.

But Samson discovered a great consolation in his sheep, and was very kind unto them. He played upon a little harp, and sang, and the sheep skipped and the young lambs gambolled. Samson said in

his heart: "I will keep the steward of my father, and he shall be my steward also. I will make him better, if that may be, but in every case will I love him, for behold was he not the steward of my father?" He played again upon his harp.

But out of the flocks behold! there ran one, an old he-goat and headstrong. And he climbed, as is often the way of a foolish goat, up into the twisted branches of a hideous thorn-tree.

And Samson, half forgetting all his recent sorrow and good resolutions, cried out in anger at the goat: "I will name thee Trivialis, sinful one. Thou art ever attempting the things thou canst not safely do, and so dost come by thorns and bruises. Ho! let me help thee, Beelzebub, spite of thy foolish wanderings. So-let me help thee."

The goat would not come down, but tried instead to get his horns against his helper. The shepherd, waxing very wroth, struck out at him, as he might at a wolf, and the goat fell out of the tree, and seemed, for the turning of a hand, to have perished. But then awoke suddenly to life, and so ran off to a little distance, where, with a comical bleat or two, he fell straight over and was indeed dead.

"Hadst thou not rather herd swine?" cried a voice of jeering. Samson, as he turned, beheld Trivialis. And he hated in that moment the very look of the man, even his vesture-the somber cloak, with spots and rings of red upon it, as if the wearer had just committed a murder (but unto Trivialis-as Samson well perceived-the spottings were comicalities). And the eyes of Trivialis were far too bright from unwatered wine and all manner of clownishness and sheer hollow mocks.

"Good steward!" cried the boy, with much consideration (seeing that the soul of him was vexed) "dost thou know whether the black ewe yielded in the night, or whether anyone was with her? It is time, the shepherds say-"

"What know I of ewes, black or white-unless it be a woman? A steward unto a Hebrew, I understand but swine."

Then he cast a stone, and it fell at the feet of the Jew. And he cried, "What say ye? Let us talk of swine, O priest of the great Sheckinah-which meaneth 'the chief of all the swine.'" And com

ing up close, he grasped the locket that was round the young lad's neck, shouting: "What is within? The tooth of a sucking pig, I warrant, or somebody's foreskin." And he tried to break the locket from its chain, crying: "To what prostitute wilt thou give it-unto Amahnah?”

Then arose in the soul of Samson all the hard-hammered hate of white-hot years.

And he struck therewith, as it were with a weapon of strong iron. Then he stood for a moment, thinking that the flow of time itself had eternally stopped. What thing was this that lay upon the ground?

He cried with a shriek, "Father! Adonai! Cain!"

From a block of granite in a far-off hill came a maddening echo, "Cain!" And the lad leaped up and ran, like one that saw not, across the very body, and stumbled over it, and fell prone.

Arising, he forced his eyes to close again, that he might believe that the body was not before him. Yet he saw it, then, with even a greater distinctness than before.

So he took his crook now and struck an acacia, as if it were a man. Then he dropped, wide-eyed, the crook, leaned over, beheld some terrible contortion, picked up his club and ran away-only, at some other acacia, to act out once again the utter tragedy of his ruined life.

And so he repeated incessantly till he came to the road that led to his father's tomb. And there he lifted up the club for good and all, and ran, as it were to a city of refuge, until he had reached the tomb.

He said to himself, "I will hide in the tomb till the evening hath fallen, and then I will slip away to Apollonia and so to Rome. There no man shall ever find me, but I will remain in hiding through the remainder of my life."

He tore away the bars which closed the door of the tomb. And entered the place, and fell upon his knees, and cried with all his might: "Oh, Adonai, Adonai! I have sinned. Wishest thou the locket? I had thought that thou didst have for me some special purpose. Did not so the Chazzan say? Idle and foolish dreamer that I was, the Chazzan too. Cain, Cain, Cain! Adonai! El-Shaddai! Would that Shiloh were come!"

In front of the straining eyes of the half-wild shepherd came again and yet again, as in a kind of miniature, the sad procession of his solitary life. How lonely it had been he never before had realized. There he was as a child, with the little horses and dromedaries which the Mongrel had made for him out of clay; there again a tiny shepherd lad, attending a solitary, sad-mouthed sheep (which, also, the Mongrel had given him); there, just a little older grown, learning from the lips of the white-haired Chazzan, or gazing upon the little Amahnah; there, once more, sitting in the lonely, crowded synagogue, or following the heels of his father into the pastures; there, by a mighty rock, tearing apart the first great wolf that ever he had laid

his hands upon-and so he had been permitted by Trivialis to take in charge a whole great flock. Then the captivity in the South, the return under Betah, the crook again and the flocks. Ah! the solitude and the loneliness amongst those ever-bleating, ever-dependent sheep! Yet in that loneliness and solitude he had come to a knowledge of Adonai such as, else, had been denied to him forever. Then the worshipping of the hawk, the murder, the sudden flight, the tomb! Here

He believed that the dim, sweet terrors of his youthful religion were things long gone and forever irrevocable.

"Adonai!"

He felt his stupid, fumbling way about the cold, clammy, unyielding death-chamber, with its insupportable darknesses; its whispering silences; its rude, imperious conceptions of the recently living, but now long-vanished dead, till his soul was filled with the raging immanence of impending disaster, eternal sheol-damnation.

"Adonai!"

A horror of life came over him and a deep sleep, and, as he slept, he murmured: "I am Cain!"

But the Lord appeared in a dream, and said unto the boy: "Samson, Samson!" And the boy said, "All unworthy, here am I." And the Lord said, "Be not wholly downcast. Thou shalt serve me as a lofty statue, for I know thy toughness and thy strength. And behold I will chisel thee twice, the first time roughly and the second exceeding fine. And when I have no further need of thee, I will break thee-and yet keep thee."

Then awoke the boy, and the hair was standing on his head and his knees were as water.

And in his heart was a feeling of mingled responsibility and joy. He heard, at a little distance, the sound of bells and of manly voices singing. He looked from the door of the tomb, and behold! a light was falling on the way.

BOOK II. THE FAILURE

CHAPTER III

THE MAN OF WORLDLY LIGHT

AFTER the Jew had left him, Trivialis lay for a long time in a deep sleep. Then, by slow degrees, he arose, and, feeling of his noggin, whispered feebly: "I am fain to laugh: The goose hath laid an egg in the hare's nest."

After a little he declared, in a somewhat stronger tone: "I was truly a fool to anger such a giant, and he a fool also. Aha! What say the Sopherim? Alas! poor Shem, do I mock thee! Well, I will carry out thy plan of revenge, even as I did promise thee. Yonder go lights from the city to the desert-even past thy tomb, O Shem, my benefactor. Now I wish I had taken thy advice. It groweth dark. But wait a little, O Master that did free me. Poor am I at the execution of mine own designs, yet, where it doth concern the plan and purpose of another- Oh thou shalt see, my Master. I am fain to laugh, but now for Rhodes!"'

He gathered up his traveller's cloak, his bulging bulga, and his little oaken staff, and set off in the way of Cyrene.

And he passed to the side of Cyrene and went the rock-cut roads to Apollonia, the seaport, being fully minded to carry out the plan which his Master had given him, and which should take him to Rhodes.

He passed along the Apollonian dock, whereby his ship lay at anchor, and then, when he had gone upon the ship, and come out again, and talked to many people, he said to himself: "I will purchase a goodly store of figs, for these be excellent eating out at sea.” But, coming before the torch-lit place where the figs were exposed to sale, he thought suddenly that he saw the form of Samson, the revenger who had sought his life that day.

He also beheld that his ship was weighing anchor. Therefore he rushed speedily up the plank and into the ship, crying: "I am fain to laugh anyhow."

And he went down into the belly of the ship, where the place was on which he was to sleep.

For many long hours he came not forth again on deck, but lay

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