gonizing in the steep refuse-laden alleys. The
faint stirrings of new life, the dim desires of young Israel to
regenerate at once itself and the soil of Palestine, the lofty
patriotism of immigrant Dreamers as yet unable to overcome the long
lethargy of holy study and of prayers for rain. A city where men go to
die, but not to live.

An accursed city, priest-ridden and pauperized, with cripples
dragging about its shrines and lepers burrowing at the Zion gate; but
a city infinitely pathetic, infinitely romantic withal, a centre
through which pass all the great threads of history, ancient and
mediaeval, and now at last quivering with the telegraphic thread of the
modern, yet only the more charged with the pathos of the past and the
tears of things; symbol not only of the tragedy of the Christ, but of
the tragedy of his people, nay of the great world-tragedy.

III

On the Eve of the Passover and Easter, the Scribe arrived at the outer
fringe of the rainbow-robed, fur-capped throng that shook in
passionate lamentation before that Titanic fragment of Temple Wall,
which is the sole relic of Israel's national glories. Roaring billows
of hysterical prayer beat against the monstrous, symmetric blocks,
quarried by King Solomon's servants and smoothed by the kisses of the
generations. A Fatherland lost eighteen hundred years ago, and still
this strange indomitable race hoped on!

"Hasten, hasten, O Redeemer of Zion."

And from amid the mourners, one tall, stately figure, robed in purple
velvet, turned his face to the Scribe, saying, with out-stretched hand
and in a voice of ineffable love--

"_Shalom Aleichem._"

And the Scribe was shaken, for lo! it was the face of the Christ.

IV

Did he haunt the Wailing Wall, then, sharing the woe of his brethren?
For in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the Scribe found him not.

V

The Scribe had slipt in half disguised: no Jew being allowed even in
the courtyard or the precincts of the sacred place. His first open
attempt had been frustrated by the Turkish soldiers who kept the
narrow approach to the courtyard. "_Rueh! Emshi!_" they had shouted
fiercely, and the Scribe recklessly refusing to turn back had been
expelled by violence. A blessing in disguise, his friends had told
him, for should the Greek-Church fanatics have become aware of him, he
might have perished in a miniature Holy War. And as he fought his way
through the crowd to gain the shelter of a balcony, he fe