iage had not been compulsory. To
boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard to please in so
important a matter as husbands.

It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam and
I were at it on the subject of religion. Truly, the Jews of that day
battened on religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my stay
in that country there was never a moment when my wits were not buzzing
with the endless discussions of life and death, law, and God. Now Pilate
believed neither in gods, nor devils, nor anything. Death, to him, was
the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem,
he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of things religious.
Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumaea, a wretched creature that
could never learn to saddle and who yet could talk, and most learnedly,
without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on the hair-splitting
differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah to Gamaliel.

But to return to Miriam.

"You believe you are immortal," she was soon challenging me. "Then why
do you fear to talk about it?"

"Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties?" I countered.

"But are you certain?" she insisted. "Tell me about it. What is it
like--your immortality?"

And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the
giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and
Loki and the frozen Jotuns--as I say, when I had told her of all this,
and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and
cried out, with sparkling eyes:

"Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the
frost! You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But
the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body
is dead?"

"As I have said, Valhalla," I answered. "And my body shall be there,
too."

"Eating?--drinking?--fighting?"

"And loving," I added. "We must have our women in heaven, else what is
heaven for?"

"I do not like your heaven," she said. "It is a mad place, a beast
place, a place of frost and storm and fury."

"And your heaven?" I questioned.

"Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits and
flowers and growing things."

I shook my head and growled:

"I do not like your heaven. It is a sad place, a soft place, a place for
weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.