crowd assembled outside the synagogue to
watch the arrival of Joseph Acosta and his beautiful bride; and there
were those who said that Uriel's hands were raised as in blessing. And
once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed
away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at
a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon--no body-snatcher, but--O
more nefarious spectacle!--the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a
new-dug grave, polluting the holy soil of the _Beth-Chayim_!

IX

And so the seasons and the years wore on, each walling in the lonely
thinker with more solid ice, and making it only the more difficult
ever to break through or to melt his prison walls. Nigh fifteen long
winter years had passed in a solitude tempered by theological thought,
and Uriel, nigh forgotten by his people, had now worked his way even
from the religion of Moses. It was the heart alone that was the seat
of religion; wherefore, no self-styled Revelation that contradicted
Nature could be true. Right Religion was according to Right Reason;
but no religion was reasonable that could set brother against brother.
All ceremonies were opposed to Reason. Goodness was the only true
religion. Such bold conclusions sometimes affrighted himself, being
alone in the world to hold them. "All evils," his note-book summed it
up in his terse Latin, "come from not following Right Reason and the
Law of Nature."

And thinking such thoughts in the dead language that befitted one cut
off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible
jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak
evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he
was still more mazed to find, for the first time in fifteen years, a
fellow-creature tendering a friendly smile and a friendly hand. He
drew back instinctively, without even recognizing the aged,
white-bearded, yet burly figure.

"What, Senhor Da Costa! thou hast forgotten thy victim?"

With a strange thrill he felt the endless years in Amsterdam slip off
him like the coils of some icy serpent, as he recognized the genial
voice of the Porto physician, and though he was back again in the
dungeon of the Holy Office, it was not the gloom of the vault that he
felt, but sunshine and blue skies and spring and youth. Through the
soft mist of delicious tears he gazed at the kindly furrowed face of
the now hoary-headed physician, and cl