Every breath of air brought a new and exquisite scent to him, and through the myrtle bushes he could hear the streams singing their way down to the lake; and when he came to the lake’s edge he heard the warble that came into his ear when he was a little child, which it retained always.  He heard it in Egypt, under the Pyramids, and the cataracts of the Nile were not able to silence it in his ears.  But suddenly from among the myrtle bushes a song arose.  It began with a little phrase of three notes, which the bird repeated, as if to impress the listener and prepare him for the runs and trills and joyous little cadenzas that were to follow.  A sudden shower of jewels it seemed like, and when the last drops had fallen the bird began another song, a continuation of the first, but more voluptuous and intense; and then, as if he felt that he had set the theme sufficiently, he started away into new trills and shakes and runs, piling cadenza upon cadenza till the theme seemed lost, but the bird held it in memory while all his musical extravagances were flowing, and when the inevitable moment came he repeated the first three notes.  Again Joseph heard the warbling water, and it seemed to him that he could hear the stars throbbing.  It was one of those moments when the soul of man seems to break, to yearn for that original unity out of which some sad fate has cast it—­a moment when the world seems to be one thing and not several things:  the stars and the stream, the odours afloat upon the stream, the bird’s song and the words of Jesus:  whosoever admires the stars and flowers finds God in his heart, seemed to become all blended into one extraordinary harmony; and unable to resist the emotion of the moment any longer, Joseph threw himself upon the ground and prayed that the moment he was living in might not be taken from him, but that it might endure for ever.  But while he prayed, the moment was passing, and becoming suddenly aware that it had gone, he rose from his knees and returned home mentally weary and sad at heart; but sitting on his bedside the remembrance that he was to meet Jesus in the morning at Capernaum called up the ghost of a departed ecstasy, and his head drowsing upon his pillow he fell asleep, hushed by remembrances.

CHAP.  XII.

A few hours later he was speeding along the lake’s edge in the bright morning, happy as the bird singing in the skies, when the thought like a dagger-thrust crossed his mind that being the son of a rich man Jesus could not receive him as a disciple, only the poor were welcome into the brotherhood of the poor.  His father had told him as much, and the beggar whom he had met under the cliffs, smelling of rags and raw garlic, expressed the riches of simplicity.  Happy, happy evening, for ever gone by!  Happy ignorance already turned into knowledge!  For in Peter’s house Jesus would hear that the man whom he had met under the cliffs was the son of the fish-salter of