r the Kaid. No longer could he serve two masters. Too long had
he held to the one, thinking that by recompense and restitution, by fair
dealing and even-handed justice, he might atone to the other. Recompense
was a mockery of the sufferings which had led to death; restitution was
no longer possible--his own purse being empty--without robbery of the
treasury of his master; fair dealing and even justice were a vain hope
in Barbary, where every man who held office, from the heartless Sultan
in his hareem to the pert Mut'hasseb in the market, must be only as a
human torture-jellab, made and designed to squeeze the life-blood out of
the man beneath him.

To endure any longer the taunts and laughter of Ben Aboo was impossible,
and to resist the covetous importunities of his Spanish woman, Katrina,
was a waste of shame and spirit. Besides, and above all, Israel
remembered that God had given him grace in the sacrifices which he had
made already. Twice had God rewarded him, in the mercy He had shown to
Naomi, for putting by the pomp and circumstance of the world. Would
His great hand be idle now--now when he most needed its mighty and
miraculous power when Naomi, being conscious of her blindness, was
mourning and crying for sweet sight of the world and he himself was
about to put under his feet the last of his possessions that separated
him from other men--his office that he wrought for in the early days
with sweat of brow and blood, and held on to in the later days through
evil report and hatred, that he might conquer the fate that had first
beaten him down!

Israel was in the way of bribing God again, forgetting, in the heat
of his desire, the shame of his journey to Shawan. He made his
preparations, and they were few. His money was gone already, and so were
his dead wife's jewels. He had determined that he would keep his house,
if only as a shelter to Naomi (for he owed something to her material
comfort as well as her spiritual welfare), but that its furniture and
belongings were more luxurious than their necessity would require or
altered state allow.

So he sold to a Jewish merchant in the Mellah the couches and great
chairs which he had bought out of England, as well as the carpets
from Rabat, the silken hangings from Fez, and the purple canopies from
Morocco city. When these were gone, and nothing remained but the simple
rugs and mattresses which are all that the house of a poor man needs in
that land where the skies a