man Empire for their rebellious projects, with the forced
conversion of the orphaned children to Islam, the Jews of the world
were celebrating--for what they thought the last time--the Day of
Atonement, and five times during that long fast-day did the weeping
worshippers, rocking to and fro in their grave-clothes, passionately
pronounce the blessing over Sabbatai Zevi, the Messiah of Israel.

Nor did the fame and memory of him perish for generations; nor the
dreamers of the Jewry cease to cherish the faith in him, many
following him in adopting the white turban of Islam.

But by what ingenious cabalistic sophistries, by what yearning
fantasies--fit to make the angels weep--his unhappy followers,
obstinate not to lose the great white hope that had come to illumine
the gloom of the Jewries, explained away his defection; what sects and
counter-sects his appostasy gave birth to, and what new prophets
arose--a guitar-playing gallant of Madrid, a tobacco dealer of
Pignerol, a blue-blooded Christian millionaire of Copenhagen--to
nourish that great pathetic hope (which still lives on) long after
Sabbatai himself, after who knows what new spasms of self-mystification
and hypocrisy, what renewed aspirations after his old greatness and his
early righteousness, what fresh torment of soul and body, died on the
Day of Atonement, a lonely white-haired exile in a little Albanian
town, where no brother Jew dwelt to close his eyelids or breathe
undying homage into his dying ears--is it not written in the chronicles
of the Ghetto?

(_Here endeth the Third and Last Scroll._)

THE MAKER OF LENSES

As the lean, dark, somewhat stooping passenger, noticeable among the
blonde Hollanders by his noble Spanish face with its black eyebrows
and long curly locks, stepped off the _trekschuyt_ on to the
canal-bank at s' Gravenhage, his abstracted gaze did not at first take
in the scowling visages of the idlers, sunning themselves as the
tow-boat came in. He was not a close observer of externals, and though
he had greatly enjoyed the journey home from Utrecht along the quaint
water-way between green walls of trees and hedges, with occasional
glimpses of flat landscapes and windmills through rifts, his sense of
the peace of Nature was wafted from the mass, from a pervasive
background of greenness and flowing water; he was not keenly aware of
specific trees, of linden, or elm, or willow, still less of the
aquatic plants and flowers that carp