sunrise found him at his post, as it was reflected sanguinarily
in those fatal mirrors.

One afternoon Joseph came, but Daniel was with him. And Uriel laid
down his pistol and waited, for he yet loved the boy. And another time
Joseph passed by with Ianthe. And Uriel waited.

But the third time Joseph came alone. Gabriel's heart gave a great
leap of exultation. He turned, took careful aim, and fired. The shot
rang through the startled neighborhood, but Joseph fled in panic,
uninjured, shouting.

Uriel dropped his pistol, half in surprise at his failure, half in
despairing resignation.

"There is no justice," he murmured. How gray the sky was! What a cold,
bleak world!

He went to the door and bolted it. Then he took up the second pistol.
Irrelevantly he noted the "G." graven on it. Gabriel! Gabriel! What
memories his old name brought back! There were tears in his eyes. Why
had he changed to Uriel? Gabriel! Gabriel! Was that his mother's voice
calling him, as she had called him in sunny Portugal, amid the vines
and the olive-trees?

Worn out, world-weary, aged far beyond his years, beaten in the long
fight, despairing of justice on earth and hopeless of any heaven,
Uriel Acosta leaned droopingly against his beloved desk, put the
pistol's cold muzzle to his forehead, pressed the trigger, and fell
dead across the open pages of his _Exemplar Humanae Vitae_, the thin,
curling smoke lingering a little ere it dissipated, like the futile
spirit of a passing creature--"a wind that passeth away and cometh not
again."

THE TURKISH MESSIAH

SCROLL THE FIRST

I

In the year of the world five thousand four hundred and eight, sixteen
hundred and forty-eight years after the coming of Christ, and in the
twenty-third year of his own life on earth, Sabbatai Zevi, men said,
declared himself at Smyrna to his disciples--the long-expected Messiah
of the Jews. They were gathered together in the winter midnight, a
little group of turbaned, long-robed figures, the keen stars
innumerable overhead, the sea stretching sombrely at their feet, and
the swarming Oriental city, a black mystery of roofs, minarets, and
cypresses, dominated by the Acropolis, asleep on the slopes of its
snow-clad hill.

Anxiously they had awaited their Prophet's emergence from his
penitential lustration in the icy harbor, and as he now stood before
them in naked majesty, the water dripping from his black beard and
hair, a perfect manly figure, sca