bor--the merchant--the
artizan--the peasant, nay even the warrior, as far beneath the godly
brotherhood who strove for only spiritual ends; and most of all he
scorned the idler, given up to sensual enjoyments.

He held him unclean who had been branded by the law; and how should
it have been otherwise? These people, who at the embalming of the dead
opened the body of the deceased, had become despised for their office of
mutilating the sacred temple of the soul; but no paraschites chose his
calling of his own free will.--[Diodorus I, 91]--It was handed down from
father to son, and he who was born a paraschites--so he was taught--had
to expiate an old guilt with which his soul had long ago burdened itself
in a former existence, within another body, and which had deprived it
of absolution in the nether world. It had passed through various animal
forms, and now began a new human course in the body of a paraschites,
once more to stand after death in the presence of the judges of the
under-world.

Pentaur had crossed the threshold of the man he despised with aversion;
the man himself, sitting at the feet of the suffering girl, had
exclaimed as he saw the priest approaching the hovel:

"Yet another white robe! Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?"

Pentaur had not answered the old man, who on his part took no further
notice of him, while he rubbed the girl's feet by order of the leech;
and his hands impelled by tender anxiety untiringly continued the same
movement, as the water-wheel in the Nile keeps up without intermission
its steady motion in the stream.

"Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?" Pentaur asked himself. "Does it
indeed possess a purifying efficacy, and is it possible that the Gods,
who gave to fire the power of refining metals and to the winds power to
sweep the clouds from the sky, should desire that a man--made in their
own image--that a man should be tainted from his birth to his death with
an indelible stain?"

He looked at the face of the paraschites, and it seemed to him to
resemble that of his father.

This startled him!

And when he noticed how the woman, in whose lap the girl's head
was resting, bent over the injured bosom of the child to catch her
breathing, which she feared had come to a stand-still--with the anguish
of a dove that is struck down by a hawk--he remembered a moment in his
own childhood, when he had lain trembling with fever on his little bed.
What then had happened to him, or