jesty. "Know ye not that this Smyrna is our capital city,
and we could confiscate your gold to our royal exchequer? Josiah is
King here." And he took his seat upon the throne vacated by Sabbatai.
"Get ye gone, or the bastinado and the bowstring shall be your
portion."

XIX

Punctually with the dawn of the Millennial Year the Turkish Messiah,
with his Queen and his train of Kings, took ship for Constantinople to
dethrone the Grand Turk, the Lord of Palestine. He voyaged in a
two-masted Levantine Saic, the bulk of his followers travelling
overland. Though his object had been diplomatically unpublished,
pompous messages from Samuel Primo had heralded his advent. The day of
his arrival was fixed. Constantinople was in a ferment. The Grand
Vizier gave secret orders for his arrest as a rebel; a band of
Chiauses was sent to meet the Saic in the harbor. But the day came and
went and no Messiah. Instead, thunders and lightnings and rain and
gales and news of wrecks. The wind was northerly, as commonly in the
Hellespont and Propontis, and it seemed as if the Saic must have been
blown out of her course.

The Jews of Constantinople asked news of every vessel. The captain of
a ketch from the Isles of Marmora told them that a chember had cast
anchor in the isles, and a tall man, clothed in white, who bestrode
the deck, being apprised that the islanders were Christians, had
raised his finger, whereupon the church burnt down. When at last the
Jews heard of the safety of Sabbatai's weather--beaten vessel, which
had made for a point on the coast of the Dardanelles, they told how
their Master had ruled the waves and the winds by the mere reading of
the hundred and sixteenth Psalm. But the news of his safety was
speedily followed by the news of his captivity; the Vizier's officers
were bringing him to Constantinople.

It was true; yet his Mussulman captors were not without a sense of the
majesty of their prisoner, for they stopped their journey at Cheknese
Kutschuk, near the capital, so that he might rest for the Sabbath, and
hither, apprised in advance by messenger, the Sabbatians of
Constantinople hastened with food and money. They still expected to
see their Sovereign arrive with pomp and pageantry, but he came up
miserably on a sorry horse, chains clanking dismally at his feet. Yet
was he in no wise dismayed. "I am like a woman in labor," he said to
his body-guard of Kings, "the redoubling of whose anguish marks the
near delive