shrub it pauses,
and imagines it sees its miserable body dangling from it, the prey of
birds and dogs.[8] This popular legend is told in the following words:

LVI. THE STORY OF JUDAS.

You must know that Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus Christ. Now when
Judas betrayed him, his Master said: "Repent, Judas, for I pardon you."
But Judas, not at all! he departed with his bag of money, in despair and
cursing heaven and earth. What did he do? While he was going along thus
desperate he came across a tamarind-tree. (You must know that the
tamarind was formerly a large tree, like the olive and walnut.) When he
saw this tamarind a wild thought entered his mind, remembering the
treason he had committed. He made a noose in a rope and hung himself to
the tamarind. And hence it is (because this traitor Judas was cursed by
God) that the tamarind-tree dried up, and from that time on it ceased
growing up into a tree and became a short, twisted, and tangled bush;
and its wood is good for nothing, neither to burn, nor to make anything
out of, and all on account of Judas, who hanged himself on it.

Some say that the soul of Judas went to the lowest hell, to suffer the
most painful torments; but I have heard, from older persons who can
know, that Judas's soul has a severer sentence. They say that it is in
the air, always wandering about the world, without being able to rise
higher or fall lower; and every day, on all the tamarind shrubs that it
meets, it sees its body hanging and torn by the dogs and birds of prey.
They say that the pain he suffers cannot be told, and that it makes the
flesh creep to think of it. And thus Jesus Christ condemned him for his
great treason.[9]

* * * * *

An interesting legend (Pitre, No. 120) is told of the Jew who struck our
Lord with the palm of his hand (St. John xviii. 22), and whom the
popular imagination has identified with the Malchus mentioned by St.
John, xviii. 10. It is called

LVII. DESPERATE MALCHUS.

This Malchus was one of those Jews who beat our Lord; a Jew more brutal
than can be told. When Christ was taken to Pilate's house, this Malchus,
with an iron glove, gave him a blow so heavy that it knocked out all his
teeth. For the sacrilegious act, the Lord condemned him to walk
constantly, without ever resting, around a column in an underground
room. This column is in a round room, and Malchus walks and walks
without ever having peace or rest. They