ent out.

"My life thou hast taken from me, Lazarus,"--said he in a spiritless,
feeble voice.

And these words of hopelessness saved him. He remembered his people,
whose shield he was destined to be, and keen salutary pain pierced his
deadened heart. "They are doomed to death," he thought wearily. "Serene
shadows in the darkness of the Infinite," thought he, and horror grew
upon him. "Frail vessels with living seething blood with a heart that
knows sorrow and also great joy," said he in his heart, and tenderness
pervaded it.

Thus pondering and oscillating between the poles of Life and Death, he
slowly came back to life, to find in its suffering and in its joys a
shield against the darkness of the void and the horror of the Infinite.

"No, thou hast not murdered me, Lazarus," said he firmly, "but I will
take thy life. Be gone."

That evening the deified Augustus partook of his meats and drinks with
particular joy. Now and then his lifted hand remained suspended in the
air, and a dull glimmer replaced the bright sheen of his fiery eye. It
was the cold wave of Horror that surged at his feet. Defeated, but not
undone, ever awaiting its hour, that Horror stood at the emperor's
bedside, like a black shadow all through his life; it swayed his nights,
but yielded the days to the sorrows and joys of life.

The following day, the hangman with a hot iron burned out Lazarus' eyes.
Then he was sent home. The deified Augustus dared not kill him.

* * * * *

Lazarus returned to the desert, and the wilderness met him with hissing
gusts of wind and the heat of the blazing sun. Again he was sitting on a
stone, his rough, bushy beard lifted up; and the two black holes in
place of his eyes looked at the sky with an expression of dull terror.
Afar-off the holy city stirred noisily and restlessly, but around him
everything was deserted and dumb. No one approached the place where
lived he who had miraculously risen from the dead, and long since his
neighbors had forsaken their houses. Driven by the hot iron into the
depth of his skull, his cursed knowledge hid there in an ambush. As
though leaping out from an ambush it plunged its thousand invisible eyes
into the man,--and no one dared look at Lazarus.

And in the evening, when the sun, reddening and growing wider, would
come nearer and nearer the western horizon, the blind Lazarus would
slowly follow it. He would stumble against stones and fall, stou