eted richly the surface of the
canal.

Even when, pursuing broodingly his homeward path through the handsome
streets of the Hague, he became at last conscious of a certain
ill-will in the faces he met, he did not at first connect it with
himself, but with the general bellicose excitement of the populace.
Although the young Prince of Orange had rewarded their insurrectionary
election of him to the Stadtholdership by redeeming them from the
despair to which the French invasion and the English fleet had
reduced them, although since his famous "I will die in the last
ditch," Holland no longer strove to commit suicide by opening its own
sluices, yet the unloosed floods of popular passion were only
partially abated. A stone that grazed his cheek and plumped against
the little hand-bag that held his all of luggage, startled him to
semi-comprehension.

They were for him, then, these sullen glances. Cries of "Traitor!"
"Godless gallows-bird!" "Down with the damned renegade!" dispelled
what doubt remained. A shade of melancholy deepened the expression of
the sweet, thoughtful mouth; then, as by volition, the habitual look
of pensive cheerfulness came back, and he walked on, unruffled.

So it had leaked out, even in his own town--where an anonymous prophet
should be without dishonor--that _he_ was the author of the infamous
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the "traitor to State and Church" of
refuting pamphleteers, the bogey of popular theology. In vain, then,
had his treatise been issued with "Hamburg" on the title-page. In vain
had he tried to combine personal peace with impersonal thought, to
confine his body to a garret and to diffuse his soul through the
world. The forger of such a thunderbolt could not remain hid from the
eyes of Europe. Perhaps the illustrious foreigners and the beautiful
bluestockings who climbed his stairs--to the detriment of his day's
work in grinding lenses--had set the Hague scenting sulphur. More
probably the hot-headed young disciples to whom he had given oral or
epistolary teaching had enthusiastically betrayed him into fame--or
infamy. It had always been thus, he mused, even in those early
half-forgotten days when he was emancipating himself from the Ghetto,
and half-shocked admirers no less than heresy-hunters bore to the ears
of the Beth-din his dreadful rejection of miracle and ceremony. Poor
Saul Morteira! How his ancient master must have been pained to
pronounce the Great Ban, though not