ars."

"And the Captain," said Isaac Silvera, "despairing of escape, planned
to take to the boats with his crew, leaving the passengers to their
fate."

"But he did not?" quoth a breathless Cabalist.

"Alas, no," said Abraham Rubio, with a comical grimace. "Would he had
done so! For then we should have owned a goodly vessel, and the Master
would have saved us all the same."

"But righteousness must needs be rewarded," protested Samuel Primo.
"And inasmuch as the Captain wished to save the Master in the boats--"

"The Master was reading," put in Solomon Lagnado. "The Captain cries
out, 'The Corsairs are upon us!' 'Where?' says the Master. 'There!'
says the Captain. The Master stretches out his hands, one towards
each vessel, and raises his eyes to heaven, and in a moment the ships
tack and sail away on the high sea."

Sabbatai sat eating his meagre meal in silence.

But when the rumor of his miracle spread, the sick and the crippled
hastened to him, and, protesting he could do naught, he laid his hands
on them, and many declared themselves healed. Also he touched the lids
of the sore-eyed and they said his fingers were as ointment. But
Sabbatai said nothing, made no pretensions, walking ever the path of
piety with meek and humble tread. Howbeit he could not linger in
Egypt. The Millennial Year was drawing nigh--the mystic 1666.

Sabbatai Zevi girded up his loins, and, regardless of the rumors of
Arab robbers, nay, wearing his phylacteries on his forehead as though
to mark himself out as a Jew, and therefore rich, joined a caravan for
Jerusalem, by way of Damascus.

X

O the ecstasy with which he prostrated himself to kiss for the first
time the soil of the sacred city! Tears rolled from his eyes, half of
rapture, half of passionate sorrow for the lost glories of Zion, given
over to the Moslem, its gates guarded by Turkish sentries, and even
the beauty of his first view of it--domes, towers, and bastions bathed
in morning sunlight--fading away in the squalor of its steep alleys.

Nathan the Prophet had apprised the Jews of the coming of their King,
and the believers welcomed him with every mark of homage, even
substituting Sabbatai Zevi for Sultan Mehemet in the Sabbath prayer
for the Sovereign, and at the Wailing Place the despairing sobs of the
Sons of the Law were tempered by a great hope.

Poor, squeezed to famishing point by the Turkish officials, deprived
of their wonted subsidies from the pious Jew