were destroyed, the grass came green out of the
ground, and Israel found bread for both of them. With such simple
husbandry, and in such a home, giving no thought to the morrow, he
passed with cheer and comfort from day to day.

And truly, if at any weaker moment he had been minded to repine for the
loss of his former poor greatness, or to fail of heart in pursuit of
his new calling, for which heavier hands were better fit, he had always
present with him two bulwarks of his purpose and sheet-anchors of his
hope. He was reminded of the one as often as in the daytime he climbed
the hillside above his little dwelling and saw the white town lying far
away under its gauzy canopy of mist, and whenever in the night the town
lamps sent their pale sheet of light into the dark sky.

"They are yonder," he would think, "wrangling, contending, fighting,
praying, cursing, blessing, and cheating; and I am here, cut off from
them by ten deep miles of darkness, in the quiet, the silence, and sweet
odour of God's proper air."

But stronger to sustain him than any memory of the ways of his former
life was the recollection of Naomi. God had given back all her gifts,
and what were poverty and hard toil against so great a blessing? They
were as dust, they were as ashes, they were what power of the world and
riches of gold and silver had been without it. And higher than the joy
of Israel's constant remembrance that Naomi had been blind and could now
see, and deaf and could now hear, and dumb and could now speak, was
the solemn thought that all this was but the sign and symbol of God's
pleasure and assurance to his soul that the lot of the scapegoat had
been lifted away.

More satisfying still to the hunger of his heart as a man was his
delicious pleasure in Naomi's new-found life. She was like a creature
born afresh, a radiant and joyful being newly awakened into a world of
strange sights.

But it was not at once that she fell upon this pleasure. What had
happened to her was, after all, a simple thing. Born with cataract on
the pupils of her eyes, the emotion of the moment at the Kasbah, when
her father's life seemed to be once more in danger, had--like a fall
or a blow--luxated the lens and left the pupils clear. That was all.
Throughout the day whereon the last of her great gifts came to her, when
they were cast out of Tetuan, and while they walked hand in hand through
the country until they lit upon their home, she had kept her eyes