her a barbarous land,
the young astronomer filled her with alarm, and besides all this her
heart was already engaged; she had given it to the son of Alabarchos,
who was the Superior of all the Israelites in Egypt, and this young
man possessed the finest horse in the whole city, with which he had won
several races in the Hippodrome, and he also had distinguished her above
all the maidens. To him, if to any one, would she give her hand, and she
had explained herself to this effect to her father when he informed her
of Ben Jochai's suit, and Apollodorus, who had lost his wife several
years before, had neither the wish nor the power to put any pressure on
his pretty darling.

To be sure the temporizing nature of the man rendered it very difficult
to him to give a decided no to his venerable old friend; but it had
to be done sooner or later, and the present evening seemed to him an
appropriate moment for this unpleasant task.

He was alone with his guests. His daughter had gone to the house of a
friend to look on at the gay doings in the street, his three sons were
out, all the slaves had leave to enjoy their holiday till midnight;
nothing was likely to disturb them, and so, after many warm expressions
of his deep respect, he found courage to confess to them that he could
not support Ben Jochai's pretensions. His child, he said, clung too
fondly to Alexandria to wish to quit it, and his learned young friend
would be but ill suited with a wife who was accustomed to freer manners
and habits, and could hardly feel herself at ease in a home where the
laws of her fathers were strictly observed, and in which therefore no
kind of freedom of life would be tolerated.

Gamaliel let the Alexandrian speak to the end, but then, as his nephew
was beginning to argue against their host's hesitancy, the old man
abruptly interrupted him. Drawing up his figure, which was a little
bent, to its full height, and passing his hand among the blue veins and
fine wrinkles that marked his high forehead, he began:

"Our house was decimated in our wars against the Romans, and among the
daughters of our race Ben Akiba found not one in Palestine who seemed to
him worthy to marry his son. But the report of the good fortune of
the Alexandrian branch of our family had reached Judea, and Ben Akiba
thought that he would do like our father Abraham, and he sent me, his
Eliezer, into a strange land to win the daughter of a kinsman to wife
for his Isaac. Now, w