cks, by hunger and by scurvy. He
laid the bodies side by side, and warmed the infant at the fire.
Looking up from the living child's face, he caught the sparkle of the
crucifix he had discovered, where it stood in the narrow window-sill.
There were gems of various colors in it, and they reflected the
firelight lustrously, like a slender chandelier, or, as the Jew
remembered in the version of the Evangels, like the gifts those
bearded wise men, of whom he might resemble one, brought to the manger
of the infant Christ--gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Struck
by the conceit, he looked again at the baby's face--the baby but a few
days or weeks old--and he felt, in spite of himself, a softness and
pity.

"It might be true," he muttered, "that a Jewish man, a tricked and
unsuspecting husband of a menial, like her who has perished with this
preacher, _did_ behold a new-born baby in the manger of an inn,
eighteen hundred and forty years ago."

He looked again at the cross. In the relief of the night against the
window-pane its jewels shone like the only living things in the hovel.
A figure was extended upon this cross, and every nail was a precious
stone; the crown of thorns was all diamonds.

"It might be true," he said again, "that on a cross-beam like that,
the manger baby perished for some audacity--as I might be put to death
if I mocked the usages of a whole nation, as this preacher has done."

The cross, an object as high as one of the window-panes, and suffused
with the exuding dyes of its jewels, took now a dewy lustre, as if
weeping precious gum and amber. The Jew felt an instant's sense of
superstition, which he dashed away, and placing the child, already
sleeping, before the fire, awakened rapacity led him to hunt the hovel
over. He found nothing but a few religious books, and amongst them a
leather-covered Testament, which he opened and read with
insensibility--passing on, at length, to interest, then to
fascination, at last to rage and defiance--the opening chapters and
the close of the story of Jesus.

"Now, by the sufferings of my patient race! I will do a thing unlike
myself, to prove this testimony a libel. Here is a child more homeless
than this carpenter, Joseph's, without the false pretence of coming
of David's line. Its mother tainted with negro blood, like the slaves
I have imported. Its father the obscurest preacher of his sect. I will
rob the shark and the crab of a repast. It shall be my ch