The City of Delight

Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green

marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original

motive. The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness,

rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no

shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.

The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of

Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city,

located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two

years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since

the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of

such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life

about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch

that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a

pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by

their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the

sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after

his master, and in an hour Joseph was once more settled, his sheep

were once more nosing over the rocky slants of a hill, his dog once

more flat on his belly, watching. But it was a different day, after

all.

The hut of the fagot-maker was the four walls and a roof and the earth

that floored it, but it was wealth because it was shelter. It had two

doors which were merely openings in the sides and between them lay the

man on sheep-pelts with a cotton abas, which one of the Galileans had

left, over him. At one of these doors, sitting sidewise, so that he

could watch in or out, sat Joseph.

All night the man on the sheepskins spoke to the blackened thatch

above him of the siege of Jerusalem and the treachery of Julian of

Ephesus. He read letters from Costobarus and instructed Aquila over

and over again. Then he tossed a coin and spent hours counting the

hairs in the long locks that fell from the shining head of the moon

down upon his breast, at midnight.

At times the boy, with the exquisite beauty of sleep on his heavy

lids, would creep over from his vigil at the door and lay his cool

hand on the sick man's forehead. And the sick man would speak in a low

controlled voice, saying: "Naaman being a leper, my friend, why was not the law fulfilled

against him?"

But the soothing influence of that touch did not endure. Again, he

took census of the fighting-men of Judea, by the Roman statistics

which he had from the decurion, and searched through his tunic for his

wallet to write down the result. Failing to find it, he raised himself

to shout for Julian to return his property.