ich gave them over to every imaginable suffering of body,
and separated them from others of their kind as absolutely as if
they had not been born like them--and notwithstanding he had been
notified on the way to look for a Nazarite whose simple description
of himself was a Voice from the Wilderness--still Ben-Hur's dream of
the King who was to be so great and do so much had colored all his
thought of him, so that he never doubted to find in the forerunner
some sign or token of the goodliness and royalty he was announcing.
Gazing at the savage figure before him, the long trains of courtiers
whom he had been used to see in the thermae and imperial corridors
at Rome arose before him, forcing a comparison. Shocked, shamed,
bewildered, he could only answer,

"It is the Nazarite."

With Balthasar it was very different. The ways of God, he knew,
were not as men would have them. He had seen the Saviour a child
in a manger, and was prepared by his faith for the rude and simple
in connection with the Divine reappearance. So he kept his seat,
his hands crossed upon his breast, his lips moving in prayer.
He was not expecting a king.

In this time of such interest to the new-comers, and in which they
were so differently moved, another man had been sitting by himself
on a stone at the edge of the river, thinking yet, probably, of the
sermon he had been hearing. Now, however, he arose, and walked slowly
up from the shore, in a course to take him across the line the Nazarite
was pursuing and bring him near the camel.

And the two--the preacher and the stranger--kept on until they
came, the former within twenty yards of the animal, the latter
within ten feet. Then the preacher stopped, and flung the hair
from his eyes, looked at the stranger, threw his hands up as a
signal to all the people in sight; and they also stopped, each in
the pose of a listener; and when the hush was perfect, slowly the
staff in the Nazarite's right hand came down and pointed to the
stranger.

All those who before were but listeners became watchers also.

At the same instant, under the same impulse, Balthasar and Ben-Hur
fixed their gaze upon the man pointed out, and both took the same
impression, only in different degree. He was moving slowly towards
them in a clear space a little to their front, a form slightly above
the average in stature, and slender, even delicate. His action
was calm and deliberate, like that habitual to men much given to
serious