d a great throng and a
strange procession. It was a procession of penance and petition, asking
God to wipe out the plague of locusts that was destroying the land and
eating up the bread of its children. A venerable Jew, with long white
beard, walked side by side with a Moor of great stature, enshrouded in
the folds of his snow-white haik. These were the chief Rabbi of the Jews
and the Imam of the Muslims, and behind them other Jews and Moors
walked abreast in the burning sun. All were barefooted, and such as were
Berbers were bareheaded also.

"In the name of Allah, the Compassionate and Merciful!" the Imam cried,
and the Muslims echoed him.

"By the God of Jacob!" the Rabbi prayed, and the Jews repeated the words
after him.

"Spare us! Spare the land!" they all cried together. "Send rain to
destroy the eggs of the locust!" cried the Rabbi. "Else will they
rise on the ground in the sunshine like rice on the granary floor; and
neither fire nor river nor the army of the Sultan will stop them; and we
ourselves will die, and our children with us!"

And the Jews cried, "God of Jacob, be our refuge."

And the Muslims shouted, "Allah, save us!"

It was a strange sight to look upon in that land of intolerance--the
haughty Moor and the despised Jew, with all petty hatreds sunk out of
sight and forgotten in the grip of the death that threatened both alike,
walking and praying in the public streets together.

Israel drew close to the wall and passed by unobserved. And being come
into the open road outside the town, he began to take a view of the
motives that had brought him away from his home again. Then he saw that,
if he was not a hypocrite like Reuben, no credit could he give himself
for what he was doing, and if he was poor who had before been rich, no
merit could he make of his poverty.

"Naomi, Naomi, all for her, all for her," he thought. Naomi was his hope
and his salvation. His faith in God was his love of the child. He
was only bribing God to give her grace. And well he knew it, while he
journeyed towards the prison behind his six mules laden with bread for
them that lay there, that, much as he owed them, being a cause of their
miseries, the mercy he was about to show them was but as mercy shown to
himself. So the nearer he came to it the lower his head sank into his
breast, as if the sun itself that beat down so fiercely upon his head
had eyes to peer into his deceiving soul.

The town of Shawan lies sixty mi