u are still the wisest man in the town."

By this time some of the Rabbis and magnates in the forefront of the
crowd had begun to look sullen at being ignored, but even more
pointedly than he ignored these pillars of the commonweal, did the
Baal Shem ignore his public reception, continuing to exchange
greetings with humble old acquaintances, and finally begging the men
between the shafts either to give place again to his horse or to draw
him to his daughter's house, whither he had undertaken to convey the
woman they saw (who all this time had sat as one in a dream). But on
the cries for a sermon persisting, he said:

"Friends, I cannot preach to you, more than my horse yonder.
Everything preaches. Call nothing common or profane; by God's presence
all things are holy. See there are the first stars. Is it not a
glorious world? Enjoy it; only fools and Rabbis speak of the world as
vanity or emptiness. But just as a lover sees even in the jewels of
his beloved only her own beauty, so in stars and waters must we see
only God." He fell a-puffing again at his pipe, but the expectant
crowd would not yet divide for his passage. "Ye fools," he said
roughly, "you would make me as you have made the Law and the world, a
place for stopping at, when all things are but on the way to God.
There was once a King," he went on, "who built himself a glorious
palace. The King was throned in the centre of what seemed a maze of
winding corridors. In the entrance--halls was heaped much gold and
silver, and here the folk were content to stay, taking their fill of
pleasure. At last the vizier had compassion upon them and called out
to them: 'All these treasures and all these walls and corridors do not
in truth exist at all. They are magical illusions. Push forward
bravely and you shall find the King.'"

But as the crowd still raged about disappointed, pleading for a
miracle, the Baal Shem whistled, and his horse flew towards him so
suddenly that I nearly fell off, and the crowd had to separate in
haste. A paralytic cripple dropped his crutch in a flurry and fell
a-running, quite cured.

"A miracle! a miracle!" cried a hundred voices. "God be praised!"

The shout was taken up all down the street, and eager spectators
surrounded the joyous cripple, interrogating him and feeling his
limbs.

"You see, you see!" I heard them say to each other. "There is
witchcraft even in his horse!"

As the animal came towards the shafts the human drawers sca