[Illustration:  “He healed the sick”]

So I saw the other wise man again and again, travelling from place to place, and searching among the people of the dispersion, with whom the little family from Bethlehem might, perhaps, have found a refuge.  He passed through countries where famine lay heavy upon the land, and the poor were crying for bread.  He made his dwelling in plague-stricken cities where the sick were languishing in the bitter companionship of helpless misery.  He visited the oppressed and the afflicted in the gloom of subterranean prisons, and the crowded wretchedness of slave-markets, and the weary toil of galley-ships.  In all this populous and intricate world of anguish, though he found none to worship, he found many to help.  He fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, and healed the sick, and comforted the captive; and his years went by more swiftly than the weaver’s shuttle that flashes back and forth through the loom while the web grows and the invisible pattern is completed.

It seemed almost as if he had forgotten his quest.  But once I saw him for a moment as he stood alone at sunrise, waiting at the gate of a Roman prison.  He had taken from a secret resting-place in his bosom the pearl, the last of his jewels.  As he looked at it, a mellower lustre, a soft and iridescent light, full of shifting gleams of azure and rose, trembled upon its surface.  It seemed to have absorbed some reflection of the colours of the lost sapphire and ruby.  So the profound, secret purpose of a noble life draws into itself the memories of past joy and past sorrow.  All that has helped it, all that has hindered it, is transfused by a subtle magic into its very essence.  It becomes more luminous and precious the longer it is carried close to the warmth of the beating heart.  Then, at last, while I was thinking of this pearl, and of its meaning, I heard the end of the story of the other wise man.

A PEARL OF GREAT PRICE

Three-and-thirty years of the life of Artaban had passed away, and he was still a pilgrim and a seeker after light.  His hair, once darker than the cliffs of Zagros, was now white as the wintry snow that covered them.  His eyes, that once flashed like flames of fire, were dull as embers smouldering among the ashes.

Worn and weary and ready to die, but still looking for the King, he had come for the last time to Jerusalem.  He had often visited the holy city before, and had searched through all its lanes and crowded hovels and black prisons without finding any trace of the family of Nazarenes who had fled from Bethlehem long ago.  But now it seemed as if he must make one more effort, and something whispered in his heart that, at last, he might succeed.  It was the season of the Passover.  The city was thronged with strangers.  The children of Israel, scattered in far lands all over the world, had returned to the Temple for the great feast, and there had been a confusion of tongues in the narrow streets for many days.