the fishermen of the Bible might have done. Then he took me down to the
end of the lake, where I suddenly perceived a ruin on the other side of
the bank a dilapidated hut, with an enormous red cross on the wall that
looked as if it might have been traced with blood, as it gleamed in the
last rays of the setting sun.

"What is that?" I asked.

"That is where Judas died," the man replied, crossing himself.

I was not surprised, being almost prepared for this strange answer.

Still I asked:

"Judas? What Judas?"

"The Wandering Jew, monsieur," he added.

I asked him to tell me this legend.

But it was better than a legend, being a true story, and quite a recent
one, since Uncle Joseph had known the man.

This hut had formerly been occupied by a large woman, a kind of beggar,
who lived on public charity.

Uncle Joseph did not remember from whom she had this hut. One evening an
old man with a white beard, who seemed to be at least two hundred years
old, and who could hardly drag himself along, asked alms of this forlorn
woman, as he passed her dwelling.

"Sit down, father," she replied; "everything here belongs to all the
world, since it comes from all the world."

He sat down on a stone before the door. He shared the woman's bread, her
bed of leaves, and her house.

He did not leave her again, for he had come to the end of his travels.

"It was Our Lady the Virgin who permitted this, monsieur," Joseph added,
"it being a woman who had opened her door to a Judas, for this old
vagabond was the Wandering Jew. It was not known at first in the
country, but the people suspected it very soon, because he was always
walking; it had become a sort of second nature to him."

And suspicion had been aroused by still another thing. This woman, who
kept that stranger with her, was thought to be a Jewess, for no one had
ever seen her at church. For ten miles around no one ever called her
anything else but the Jewess.

When the little country children saw her come to beg they cried out:
"Mamma, mamma, here is the Jewess!"

The old man and she began to go out together into the neighboring
districts, holding out their hands at all the doors, stammering
supplications into the ears of all the passers. They could be seen at
all hours of the day, on by-paths, in the villages, or again eating
bread, sitting in the noon heat under the shadow of some solitary tree.
And the country people began to call the beggar Old Judas.

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