of yellowish bright
chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so
soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they
had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the Jew,
hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so
embittered by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the
world, melted under the stranger's look, and became as a child's.
He put his lips to the pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word
was said to him, nor did he say a word.

When the draught was finished, the hand that had been resting upon
the sufferer's shoulder was placed upon his head, and stayed there
in the dusty locks time enough to say a blessing; the stranger then
returned the pitcher to its place on the stone, and, taking his
axe again, went back to Rabbi Joseph. All eyes went with him,
the decurion's as well as those of the villagers.

This was the end of the scene at the well. When the men had drunk,
and the horses, the march was resumed. But the temper of the decurion
was not as it had been; he himself raised the prisoner from the dust,
and helped him on a horse behind a soldier. The Nazarenes went to their
houses--among them Rabbi Joseph and his apprentice.

And so, for the first time, Judah and the son of Mary met and parted.

BOOK THIRD

"Cleopatra.... Our size of sorrow,
Proportion'd to our cause, must be as great
As that which makes it.--
Enter, below, DIOMEDES.
How now? is he dead?

Diomedes. His death's upon him, but not dead."
Antony and Cleopatra (act iv., sc. xiii.).

CHAPTER I

The city of Misenum gave name to the promontory which it crowned,
a few miles southwest of Naples. An account of ruins is all that
remains of it now; yet in the year of our Lord 24--to which it is
desirable to advance the reader--the place was one of the most
important on the western coast of Italy.[1]

[1] The Roman government, it will be remembered, had two harbors in
which great fleets were constantly kept--Ravenna and Misenum.

In the year mentioned, a traveller coming to the promontory to
regale himself with the view there offered, would have mounted
a wall, and, with the city at his back, looked over the bay of
Neapolis, as charming then as now; and then, as now, he would
have seen the matchless shore, the smoking cone, the sky and
waves so softly, deeply blue, Ischia here and Cap