the mountain, a
sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire, loomed across the
night-a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.

The sad shepherd remembered it well. He looked at it with the eyes of a
child who has been in hell. It burned him from afar. Turning neither to
the right nor to the left, he walked without a path straight out upon
the plain of Bethlehem, still whitened in the hollows and on the
sheltered side of its rounded hillocks by the veil of snow.

He faced a wide and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to
the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away
from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the
blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like
pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a
bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The
ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber
along the horizon, and between them he caught a glimpse of the sunken
Lake of Death, darkly gleaming in its deep bed. There was no movement,
no sound, on the plain where he walked, except the soft-padding feet of
his dumb, obsequious flock.

He felt an endless isolation strike cold to his heart, against which he
held the limp body of the wounded kid, wondering the while, with a
half-contempt for his own foolishness, why he took such trouble to save
a tiny scrap of the worthless tissue which is called life.

Even when a man does not know or care where he is going, if he steps
onward he will get there. In an hour or more of walking over the plain
the sad shepherd came to a sheep-fold of gray stones with a rude tower
beside it. The fold was full of sheep, and at the foot of the tower a
little fire of thorns was burning, around which four shepherds were
crouching, wrapped in their thick woollen cloaks.

As the stranger approached they looked up, and one of them rose quickly
to his feet, grasping his knotted club. But when they saw the flock
that followed the sad shepherd, they stared at each other and said: "It
is one of us, a keeper of sheep. But how comes he here in this raiment?
It is what men wear in kings' houses."

"No," said the one who was standing, "it is what they wear when they
have been thrown out of them. Look at the rags. He may be a thief and a
robber with his stolen flock."

"Salute him when he comes near," said the oldest shepherd. "Are we not
four to