WERE--LEPERS!

Possibly the reader does not know all the word means. Let him be
told it with reference to the Law of that time, only a little
modified in this.

"These four are accounted as dead--the blind, the leper, the poor,
and the childless." Thus the Talmud.

That is, to be a leper was to be treated as dead--to be excluded
from the city as a corpse; to be spoken to by the best beloved
and most loving only at a distance; to dwell with none but lepers;
to be utterly unprivileged; to be denied the rites of the Temple
and the synagogue; to go about in rent garments and with covered
mouth, except when crying, "Unclean, unclean!" to find home in the
wilderness or in abandoned tombs; to become a materialized specter
of Hinnom and Gehenna; to be at all times less a living offence to
others than a breathing torment to self; afraid to die, yet without
hope except in death.

Once--she might not tell the day or the year, for down in the
haunted hell even time was lost--once the mother felt a dry scurf
in the palm of her right hand, a trifle which she tried to wash
away. It clung to the member pertinaciously; yet she thought
but little of the sign till Tirzah complained that she, too,
was attacked in the same way. The supply of water was scant,
and they denied themselves drink that they might use it as a
curative. At length the whole hand was attacked; the skin cracked
open, the fingernails loosened from the flesh. There was not much
pain withal, chiefly a steadily increasing discomfort. Later their
lips began to parch and seam. One day the mother, who was cleanly
to godliness, and struggled against the impurities of the dungeon
with all ingenuity, thinking the enemy was taking hold on Tirzah's
face, led her to the light, and, looking with the inspiration of a
terrible dread, lo! the young girl's eyebrows were white as snow.

Oh, the anguish of that assurance!

The mother sat awhile speechless, motionless, paralyzed of soul,
and capable of but one thought--leprosy, leprosy!

When she began to think, mother-like, it was not of herself, but her
child, and, mother-like, her natural tenderness turned to courage,
and she made ready for the last sacrifice of perfect heroism. She
buried her knowledge in her heart; hopeless herself, she redoubled
her devotion to Tirzah, and with wonderful ingenuity--wonderful
chiefly in its very inexhaustibility--continued to keep the
daughter ignorant of what they were beset with, and even