in his house the angry Pharisees would demand their death from Pilate.  If he would escape the doom of the cross he must roll the stone up into the entrance of the sepulchre....  A dying man perceives no difference between a sepulchre and a dwelling-house.  He would be dead before morning; before the Sabbath was done for certain; and Mary and Martha would begin the embalmment on Sunday.  He would be dead certainly on Sunday morning, and dead men tell no tales, so they say.  But do they say truly?  The dead are voiceless, but they speak, and are closer to us than the living; and for ever the spectre of that man would be by him, making frightful every hour of his life.  Yet by closing up the sepulchre and leaving Jesus to die in it he would be serving him better than by carrying him to his house and bringing him back to life.  To what life was he bringing him?  He could not be kept hidden for long; he could not remain in Jerusalem, and whither Jesus went Joseph would follow, and his bond to his father would be broken then in spirit as well as in fact.  A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and for a long time his mind seemed like a broken thing and the pieces scattered; and as much exhausted as if he had carried Jesus a mile on his shoulders, he stooped forward and entered the tomb, without certain knowledge whether he was going to kiss Jesus and close the tomb upon him or carry him to his house about a half-an-hour distant.

As he drew the cere-cloths from the body, a vision of his house rose up in his mind—­a large two-storeyed house with a domed roof, situated on a large vineyard on the eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives, screened from the highway by hedges of carob, olive garths and cedars.  And this house seemed to Joseph as if designed by Providence for the concealment of Jesus.  The only way, he muttered, will be to lift him upon my shoulders, getting the weight as far as I can from off my arms.  If he could walk a little supported on my arm.  He questioned Jesus, but Jesus could not answer him; and there seemed to be no other way but to carry him in his arms out of the tomb, place him on the rock, and from thence hoist him on to his shoulders.

Jesus was carried more easily than he thought for, as easily carried as a child for the first hundred yards, nor did he weigh much heavier for the next, but before three hundred yards were over Joseph began to look round for a rock against which he might rest his burden.

One of the hardships of this journey was that howsoever he held Jesus he seemed to cause him great pain, and he guessed by the feel that the body was wounded in many places; but the stars did not show sufficient light for him to see where not to grasp it, and he sat in the pathway, resting Jesus across his knees, thinking of a large rock within sight of his own gates and how he would lean Jesus against it, if he managed to carry him so far.  He stopped at sight of something, something seemed to slink through the pale, diffused