a Messiah.

IV

He had been strange and solitary from childhood, this saintly son of
the Smyrniote commission agent. He had no playmates, none of the
habits of the child. He would wander about the city's steep bustling
alleys that seemed hewn in a great rock, or through the long,
wooden-roofed bazaars, seeming to heed the fantastically colored
spectacle as little as the garbage under foot, or the trains of
gigantic camels, at the sound of whose approaching bells he would
mechanically flatten himself against the wall. And yet he must have
been seeing, for if he chanced upon anything that suffered--a child, a
lean dog, a cripple, a leper--his eyes filled with tears. At times he
would stand on the brink of the green gulf and gaze seawards long and
yearningly, and sometimes he would lie for hours upon the sudden plain
that stretched lonely behind the dense port.

In the little congested school-room where hundreds of children
clamored Hebrew at once he was equally alone; and when, a brilliant
youth, he headed the lecture-class of the illustrious Talmudist,
Joseph Eskapha, his mental attitude preserved the same aloofness.
Quicker than his fellows he grasped the casuistical hair-splittings in
which the Rabbis too often indulged, but his contempt was as quick as
his comprehension. A note of revolt pierced early through his
class-room replies, and very soon he threw over these barren
subtleties to sink himself--at a tenderer age than tradition knew
of--in the spiritual mysticisms, the poetic fervors, and the
self-martyrdoms of the Cabalistic literature. The transmigrations of
souls, mystic marriages, the summoning of spirits, the creation of the
world by means of attributes, or how the Godhead had concentrated
itself within itself in order to unfold the finite Many from the
infinite One; such were the favorite studies of the brooding youth of
fifteen.

"Learning shall be my life," he said to his father.

"Thy life! But what shall be thy livelihood?" replied Mordecai Zevi.
"Thy elder brothers are both at work."

"So much more need that one of thy family should consecrate himself to
God, to call down a blessing on the work of the others."

Mordecai Zevi shook his head. In his olden days, in the Morea, he had
known the bitterness of poverty. But he was beginning to prosper now,
like so many of his kinsmen, since Sultan Ibrahim had waged war
against the Venetians, and, by imperilling the trade of the Levant,
had driven t