asked if it would not be better for Jesus to go up to Galilee and wait till the priests were less prepared to resist him.  No, no, to Jerusalem, to Jerusalem, they cried on every side, and voices were again raised, and the Galileans admitted that they had come down from Galilee for this revolution, and had been insulted in the Temple by the Scribes, and laughed at, and called “foolish Galileans”; but they would show the Scribes what the Galileans could do.  Was it true that Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jewish people by the prophet Daniel?—­and while Joseph was seeking an answer to this question a woman cried:  you’re not worthy of a Messiah, for do you not know that he is the one promised to us in Holy Writ?  And do not his miracles prove that he is the Messiah we have been waiting for?  None but the true Messiah could have rid my son of the demon that infested him for two years; and with these words gaining the attention of the crowd she related how the ghost of a man long dead had come into her boy when he was but fourteen, bringing him to the verge of death in two years—­a pale, exhausted creature, having no will of his own nor strength for anything.  But how, asked Joseph, do you know that the demon was the ghost of a man that had lived long ago?  Because in life he had dearly loved his wife, but had found her to be unfaithful to him and had died of grief twenty years ago, and was captured then by the beauty of my boy; and his grief entered into the boy and abode in him, and would have destroyed him utterly if Jesus had not imposed his hands upon him and put the vampire to flight.  Whither I know not, but my boy is free.  It is as the woman says, a man cried out, for I’ve seen the boy, and he is free now of the demon.  My limb, too, is proof that Jesus is a prophet.  And the lion-hunter told how in a fight with a great beast his thigh had been dislocated; and for seven years he had walked with a crutch, but the moment Jesus imposed his hands upon him the use of his limb was given back to him.

Another came forward and showed his arm, which for many a year had hung lifeless, but as soon as Jesus took it in his hand the sinews reknit themselves, and now it was stronger than the other.  And then a woman pressed through the crowd, and she wished everybody to know that a flux of blood that had troubled her for seven years had been healed.  But the people were bored with accounts of miracles and were now anxious to hear from Joseph if Jesus was going up to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover.  But, my friends, I have but just returned from Galilee, and have come from there to learn these things.  He is watching for a sign from his Father in heaven, a woman cried, shaking her head.  A man tried to get some words privily with Joseph:  will he speak against the taxes? he asked, but before he could get any further Nicodemus appeared in the doorway, and the people pressed round him, asking what Jesus had said to him, and if he were coming down to speak