from his teaching. But Samuel did not appear again, perhaps
because the nights were so dark. Joseph was told the moon would become
full again, but sleep closed his eyes when he should have been waking,
and in the morning he was full of fear that perhaps Samuel had come and
gone away disappointed at not finding him awake. But that could not be,
for if the prophet had come he would have awakened him as he had done
before. His ancestor had not come again: a reasonable thing to suppose,
for when the dead return to the earth they do so with much pain and
difficulty; and if the living, whom they come to instruct, cannot keep
their eyes open, the poor dead wander back and do not try to come
between their descendants and their fate again.

But I will keep awake, he said, and resorted to all sorts of devices,
keeping up a repetition of a little phrase: he will come to-night when
the moon is full; and lying with one leg hanging out of bed; and these
proving unavailing he strewed his bed with crumbs. But no ancestor
appeared, and little by little he relinquished hope of ever being able
to summon Samuel to his bedside, and accepted as an explanation of his
persistent absence that Samuel had performed his duty by coming once to
visit him and would not come again unless some new necessity should
arise. It was then that the conviction began to mount into his brain
that he must learn all that his grandmother could tell him about Saul
and David, and learning from her that they had been a great trouble to
Samuel he resolved never to allow a thought into his mind that the
prophet would deem unworthy. To become worthy of his ancestor was now
his aim, and when he heard that Samuel was the author of two sacred
books it seemed to him that his education had been neglected: for he had
not yet been taught to read. Another step in his advancement was the
discovery that the language his father, his granny and himself spoke was
not the language spoken by Samuel, and every day he pressed his
grandmother to tell him why the Jews had lost their language in Babylon,
till he exhausted the old woman's knowledge and she said: well now, Son,
if you want to hear any more about Babylon you must ask your father, for
I have told you all I know. And Joseph waited eagerly for his father to
come home, and plagued him to tell him a story.

But after a long day spent in the counting-house his father was often
too tired to take him on his knee and instruct him, for