fted from the
orange-groves, and seemed to the worn pilgrim a symbol of the marriage
betwixt him and Zion. The land of his fathers--there it lay at last,
and in a transport of happiness the wanderer had, for the first time
in his life, a sense of the restful dignity of an ancestral home. But
as the boat labored without apparent progress towards the channel
betwixt the black rocks, over which the spray flew skywards, a
foreboding tortured him that some ironic destiny would drown him in
sight of his goal. He prayed silently with shut eyes and his petition
changed to praise as the boat bumped the landing-stage and he opened
them on a motley Eastern crowd and the heaped barrels of a wharf.
Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition,
felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled
ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had
one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a
shabby black uniform stopped him.

"Your passport," he said, in Arabic. Aaron could not understand.
Somebody interpreted.

"I have no passport," he answered, with a premonitory pang.

"Where are you going?"

"To live in Palestine."

"Where do you come from?"

"England," he replied triumphantly, feeling this was a mighty password
throughout the world.

"You are not an Englishman?"

"No-o," he faltered. "I have lived in England some--many years."

"Naturalized?"

"No," said Aaron, when he understood.

"What countryman are you?"

"Russian."

"And a Jew, of course?"

"Yes."

"No Russian Jews may enter Palestine."

Aaron was hustled back into the boat and restored safely to the
steamer.

THE CONCILIATOR OF CHRISTENDOM

I

The Red Beadle shook his head. "There is nothing but Nature," he said
obstinately, as his hot iron polished the boot between his knees. He
was called the Red Beadle because, though his irreligious opinions had
long since lost him his synagogue appointment and driven him back to
his old work of bootmaking, his beard was still ruddy.

"Yes, but who made Nature?" retorted his new employer, his strange,
scholarly face aglow with argument, and the flame of the lamp
suspended over his bench by strings from the ceiling. The other
clickers and riveters of the Spitalfields workshop, in their shocked
interest in the problem of the origin of Nature, ceased for an instant
breathing in the odors of burnt grease, cobbler's wax, and a c