n. As there were always many
Pharisees and Sadducees among the crowds assembled to hear the Master,
he did not land, but preached standing up in the bow, Peter vigilant
with an oar, for priests are everywhere enemies of reformation and
instigate attacks upon reformers, and those made on Jesus were often so
violent that Peter had to strike out to the right and left, but he
always managed to get free, and they sailed for less hostile coasts or
back to the wharf at Capernaum.

It once occurred to them to try their luck with the Gadarenes, and it
was in returning from their coasts one evening that Peter's boat was
caught in a great storm and that Joseph was met by one of his father's
servants as he jumped ashore. The man had come to tell him that if he
wished to see his father alive he must hasten to Magdala, and Joseph
glared at him dumbfounded, for he had suspected all along that he had
little or no right at all to leave his father for Jesus. I did not know
I was like this, he blurted out to himself. And as much to silence his
accusing conscience as anything else he questioned the stupid messenger,
asking him if his father had seen a physician, and if the physician had
held out any hopes of a recovery. But the thin and halting account which
was all the messenger could give only increased Joseph's alarm, and it
was with much difficulty that he learnt from him that the master had
brought some walnuts to the parrots, and just after giving a nut to the
green parrot had cried out to Tobias that a great pain had come into his
head. Joseph dug his heels into his ass's side and cried to the
messenger: and then? The messenger answered that the pain in the back of
his father's head had become so great that he had begun to reel about,
overthrowing one of the parrots on its perch. The parrot flew at master,
thinking he had done it---- Never mind the parrot, Joseph replied
angrily, confusing the messenger, who told him that the master had
entered the house on Tobias' arm, and had sat down to supper but had
eaten nothing to speak of. None of us dared to go to bed that night, the
messenger continued. We sat up, expecting every moment somebody to come
down from the room overhead to tell us that the master was dead. The
next part of the messenger's story was like a tangled skein, and Joseph
half heard and half understood that the great physician that had come
from Tiberias had said that he must awaken the master out of the swoon
and at an