as a beloved daughter of her old age.

And her hosts--what kind-hearted though singular folks! nay, in their
way, remarkable. She had never dreamed that there could be on earth any
beings at once so odd and so lovable.

First there was old Rufinus, the head of the house, a vigorous, hale old
man, who, with his long silky, snow-white hair and beard, looked
something like the aged St. John and something like a warrior grown grey
in service. What an amiable spirit of childlike meekness he had, in spite
of the rough ways he sometimes fell into. Though inclined to be
contradictory in his intercourse with his fellow-men, he was merry and
jocose when his views were opposed to theirs. She had never met a more
contented soul or a franker disposition, and she could well understand
how much it must fret and gall such a man to live on,--day after day,
appearing, in one respect at any rate, different from what he really was.
For he, too, belonged to her confession; but, though he sent his wife and
daughter to worship in the convent chapel, he himself was compelled to
profess himself a Coptic Christian, and submit to the necessity of
attending a Jacobite church with all his family on certain holy days,
averse as he was to its unattractive form of worship.

Rufinus possessed a sufficient fortune to secure him a comfortable
maintenance; and yet he was hard at work, in his own way, from morning
till night. Not that his labors brought him any revenues; on the
contrary, they led to claims on his resources; every one knew that he was
a man of good means, and this would have certainly involved him in
persecution if the Patriarch's spies had discovered him to be a Melchite,
resulting in exile and probably the confiscation of his goods. Hence it
was necessary to exercise caution, and if the old man could have found a
purchaser for his house and garden, in a city where there were ten times
as many houses empty as occupied, he would long since have set out with
all his household to seek a new home.

Most aged people of vehement spirit and not too keen intellect, adopt a
saying as a stop-gap or resting-place, and he was fond of using two
phrases one of which ran: "As sure as man is the standard of all things"
and the other--referring to his house--"As sure as I long to be quit of
this lumber." But the lumber consisted of a well-built and very spacious
dwellinghouse, with a garden which had commanded a high price in earlier
times on account o