his hand and
hobbled away shrieking, awaking Dan, who had been dozing, and who,
seeing whence the shrieking came, closed his eyes again. While his
father slept Joseph remembered that Peter, John and James stood by the
Master throughout the dissidence. But what answer will they give, Joseph
asked himself, when they are questioned as to what the Master meant when
he said that they must drink his blood and eat his flesh? What answer
will they make when the people question them in the different
countries?--for they are to go to every part of the world, carrying the
joyful tidings. It seemed to Joseph that the apostles would be able to
make plain these hard sayings even less well than he, and he could not
make plain to anybody what the Master had meant, and still less would he
be able to convince others that the Master had said well that a man must
leave his father though he were dying. He said that he should leave his
father unburied, the dead not needing our care, for they are the living
ones, and the hyenas and crows would find to eat only that which had
always been dead. Of course if the old world were going out and the new
coming in, it mattered very little what happened within the next
twenty-four hours. But was the new world as near as that? He wondered!
It might be nearer still without his being able to leave his father to
die among strangers, and a feeling rose up within him that he knew he
would never be able to subdue though he were to gain an eternity of
happiness by subduing it; and, pursuing this thread of thought, he came
to the conclusion that he was a very weak creature, neither sufficiently
enamoured of this world nor of the next; so he supposed Jesus was right
to discard him, for, as he knew himself, he would be an insufficient
apostle, just as he was an insufficient son. But his father did not
think him a bad son. He raised his eyes, and, finding his father's eyes
upon him, he remembered that he had left him because he wished to see
the world, to go to Jerusalem, to live with the Essenes, to go to Egypt;
and that he had remained away for nearly two years, and had returned to
settle a business matter between himself and his father. Therefore it
was not love of his father but a business matter that brought him back
from Egypt; and now he was going to leave his father again, though he
knew that his father wished him to marry some lusty girl, who would bear
healthy children.

If he were a good son he would t