(cf.  Luke 7:39).  And then the big brother came and fetched them away from the little house to the shop, and set one of them to pick up nails, and the other to sweep up shavings—­to help the carpenter.  They helped him.  Like small boys, when they help, they got in his road at every turn.  But somehow they slipped back to a jolly frame of mind.  The big brother told them stories, and they came back different people.  I can picture a day when there was a woman in the little house, weary and heavy-laden, and the door opened, and a cheery, pleasant face looked in, and said, “Won’t you come and talk to me?” And she came and talked with him and life became a different thing for her.  Are these pictures fanciful—­mere imagination?  Are we to think that all the tenderness of Jesus came to him by a miracle when he was thirty years of age?  Must we not think it was all growing up in that house and in that shop?  Or did he never tell a story—­he who tells them so charmingly—­till he wanted parables?  We have to note, at the same time, some elements of criticism of the elder brother in the family attitude, some defect of sympathy and failure to understand him, even if kindness prompted their action in later days (Mark 3:21, 31).

Nazareth lies in a basin among hills, from the rim of which can be seen to the southward the historic plain of Esdraelon, and eastward the Jordan valley and the hills of Gilead, and westward the Mediterranean.  On great roads, north and south of the town’s girdle of hills, passed to and fro the many-coloured traffic between Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Orient.  Traders, pilgrims, Herods—­“the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” (Matt. 6:8)—­all within reach, and travelling no faster as a rule than the camel cared to go—­they formed a panorama of life for a thoughtful and imaginative boy.  More than one allusion to king’s clothes comes in his recorded teaching (Matt. 6:29, 11:8), and it was here that he saw them—­and noticed them and remembered.  One is struck with the amount of that unconscious assimilation of experience which we find in his words, and which is in itself an index to his nature.  We are not expressly told that he sought the sights that the road afforded; but it would be hard to believe that a bright, quick boy, with genius in him, with poetry in him, with feeling for the real and for life, never went down on to that road, never walked alongside of the caravans and took note of the strange people “from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” (Luke 13:29)—­Nubians, Egyptians, Romans, Gauls, Britons, and Orientals.[8] In the one anecdote that survives of his boyhood, we find men “astonished at his understanding” (Luke 2:47), his gift for putting questions, and his comments on the answers; and all life through he had a genius for friendship.