and great shoulders.  Joseph was laughing with his companions at that moment and his teeth glistened, every one white and shapely.  Why do such discussions interest him?  Dan asked, for his eyes are soft as flowers; and he envied the woman that Joseph would resort unto in the night.  But very often men like Joseph did not marry, and a new disquietude arose in his mind:  he wanted children, grandchildren.  In a few years Joseph should begin to look round....  Meanwhile it might be well to tell him that men like Hillel had always held that it is after the spirit rather than the letter we should strive, and that in running after the latter we are apt to lose the former, and he accepted the first opportunity to admonish Joseph, who listened in amazement, wondering what had befallen his father, whom he had never heard speak like this before.  All the same he hearkened to these warnings and laid them in his memory, and fell to considering his father as one who had just jogged along the road that he and his ancestors had come by, without much question.  But if his father had set himself to consider religions, and with that seriousness they deserved, he would not keep back any longer the matter on which he had long desired to speak to him.

The young men to whom he had just bidden good-bye were all going to Jerusalem, whither Dan was accustomed to go every year for the Feast of the Passover, but last year the journey thither had fatigued him unduly, and it seemed to Joseph that this year he should go to Jerusalem in his father’s place; and when he broached the subject, Dan, who had been thinking for some time that he was not feeling strong enough for this journey, welcomed Joseph’s proposal—­a most proper presence Joseph’s would be at the Feast.  Joseph had come to the age when he should visit Jerusalem, but he did not readily understand this sudden enthusiasm.  If he wanted to go to Jerusalem to the Feast of the Passover, why had he not said so before?  And Dan, whose thoughts reached back to the discussion overheard in the yard, was compelled to ask Joseph if it were for the purpose of discussing the value of certain minute points of law that he wished to go to Jerusalem.  At which Joseph was astonished that his father should have asked him such a thing....  Yet why not?  For awhile back he was discussing such very points with some young gossips.  His tongue wagged as was its wont on all occasions, though his mind was away and he suddenly stopped speaking; and when the stirring of his father’s feet on the floor awakened him, he saw his father sitting pen in hand watching him and no doubt asking himself of what great and wonderful thing his son was thinking.

Once again actuality disappeared.  He stood engulfed in memories of things heard in Azariah’s house:  or things only half heard, for he had never thought of them since.  The words of the Jews he met there had fallen dead at the time, but now he remembered things that had passed over his mind.  The heresies of the Jews in Alexandria awoke in him, and a marvellous longing awoke to see the world.  First of all he must begin with Jerusalem, and he bade his father good-bye with an eagerness not too pleasant to the old man.