m the general bounty exactly one year, to be recruited in equal
portions from a married lover, a warrior, a poet, and a statesman; and,
the matter thus settled, Jochanan Hakkadosh fell asleep.

Four times the Rabbi awoke, in renewed health and strength: and four
times again he fell asleep: and at the close of each waking term Tsaddik
revisited him as he sat in his garden--amidst the bloom or the languors,
the threatenings or the chill, of the special period of the year--and
questioned him of what he had learned. And each time the record was like
that of the previous seventy-nine years, one of disappointment and
failure. For the gift had been drawn in every case from a young life,
and been neutralized by its contact with the old. As a lover, the Rabbi
declares, he has dreamed young dreams, and his older self has seen
through them. He has known beforehand that the special charms of his
chosen one would prove transitory, and that the general attraction of
her womanhood belonged to her sex and not to her. As a warrior, he has
experienced the same process of disenchantment. For the young believe
that the surest way to the Right and Good, is that, always, which is cut
by the sword: and that the exercise of the sword is the surest training
for those self-devoting impulses which mark the moral nature of man. The
old have learned that the most just war involves, in its penalties, the
innocent no less than the guilty; that violence rights no wrong which
time and patience would not right more fully; and that for the purposes
of self devotion, unassisted love is more effective than hate.
(Picturesque illustrations are made to support this view.) As poet, he
has recalled the glow of youthful fancy to feel it quenched by the
experience of age: to see those soaring existences whose vital
atmosphere is the future, frozen by their contact with a dead past. As
statesman, he has looked out upon the forest of life, again seeing the
noble trees by which the young trace their future path. And, seeing
these, he has known, that the way leads, not by them, but among the
brushwood and briars which fill the intervening space; that the
statist's work is among the mindless many who will obstruct him at every
step, not among the intellectual few by whom his progress would be
assisted.

As he completes his testimony another change comes over him; and
Tsaddik, kissing the closing eyelids, leaves his master to die.

The rumour of a persecution scatte