y
entered unceremoniously.

"I give you peace," the watchman said to Joseph and the Beth
Dagonite. "Here are people looking for a child born this night,
whom they are to know by finding him in swaddling-clothes and
lying in a manger."

For a moment the face of the stolid Nazarene was moved; turning away,
he said, "The child is here."

They were led to one of the mangers, and there the child was. The
lantern was brought, and the shepherds stood by mute. The little
one made no sign; it was as others just born.

"Where is the mother?" asked the watchman.

One of the women took the baby, and went to Mary, lying near,
and put it in her arms. Then the bystanders collected about
the two.

"It is the Christ!" said a shepherd, at last.

"The Christ!" they all repeated, falling upon their knees in worship.
One of them repeated several times over,

"It is the Lord, and his glory is above the earth and heaven."

And the simple men, never doubting, kissed the hem of the mother's
robe, and with joyful faces departed. In the khan, to all the people
aroused and pressing about them, they told their story; and through
the town, and all the way back to the marah, they chanted the refrain
of the angels, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
good-will towards men!"

The story went abroad, confirmed by the light so generally seen;
and the next day, and for days thereafter, the cave was visited
by curious crowds, of whom some believed, though the greater part
laughed and mocked.

CHAPTER XII

The eleventh day after the birth of the child in the cave,
about mid-afternoon, the three wise men approached Jerusalem by
the road from Shechem. After crossing Brook Cedron, they met many
people, of whom none failed to stop and look after them curiously.

Judea was of necessity an international thoroughfare; a narrow
ridge, raised, apparently, by the pressure of the desert on
the east, and the sea on the west, was all she could claim to
be; over the ridge, however, nature had stretched the line of
trade between the east and the south; and that was her wealth.
In other words, the riches of Jerusalem were the tolls she levied
on passing commerce. Nowhere else, consequently, unless in Rome,
was there such constant assemblage of so many people of so many
different nations; in no other city was a stranger less strange
to the residents than within her walls and purlieus. And yet these
three men excited the wonder of all