laimed the excited orator. "Mark you, men of Judah, mark you the
blindness that falls on some men--ay, even on a reputed saint like the
Lady Hadassah! Joab has learned from her handmaiden the astounding
fact that for months this Lycidas, this viper, was nurtured and tended
in her home, as if he had been a son of Abraham! Doubtless it was this
act of worse than folly on the part of Hadassah that drew down a
judgment on her and her house. Mark what followed. The warmed viper
escapes from her dwelling, and the next day--ay, the very next
day--Syrian dogs beset the house of Salathiel as he celebrates the holy
Feast! Who guided them thither?" The question was asked with
passionate energy, and the feelings of the speaker were evidently
beginning to communicate themselves to the audience. "Who then lay a
bleeding corpse on the threshold, slain by the murderous Syrians?"
continued Jasher, with yet fiercer action; "who but Abishai, the brave,
the faithful, he who had denounced the viper, and had sought, but in
vain, to crush it--it was he who fell at last a victim to its
treacherous sting!" Jasher ended his peroration with a hissing sound
from between his clinched teeth, and the caldron of human feelings
around him began, as it were, to seethe and boil. Fanaticism stops not
to weigh evidence, or to listen to reason. Joab could hardly make his
voice heard amidst the roar of angry voices that was rising around him.

"Lycidas was present and helped at the burial of the Lady Hadassah; he
has risked his life to protect her daughter," cried the honest defender
of the Greek.

"Ha! ha! how much he risked we know not, but we can well guess what he
would win!" exclaimed Jasher, with a look of withering scorn. "He has
crept into the favour of a foolish girl, who forgets the traditions of
her people, who cares not for the afflictions of Jacob, who prefers a
goodly person"--the old man's features writhed with the fierceness of
his satire--"to all that a child of Abraham should regard with
reverence and honour! But what can we expect from the daughter of a
perjured traitor, an apostate? Had she not Abner for a father, and can
we expect otherwise than that she should disgrace her family, her
tribe, her nation, by wedding an accursed Gentile, a detestable Greek?"

"Never! never!" yelled out a hundred fierce voices. And one of the
crowd shouted aloud, "I would rather slay her with my own hand, were
she my own daughter!"

"I ca