get thee baptized and repent!  On which he reached out his hand to his store of locusts, and while munching a few he added:  the Baptist is greater than Jesus, and he is still baptizing.  Get thee to Jordan!  At this Joseph took offence and returned to the cenoby with the intention of resuming his teaching.  But he was again so possessed of Jesus that he could not keep his mind on the lesson before him:  a pupil was often forced to put a question to him in a loud voice, and perhaps to repeat it, before Joseph’s sick reverie was sufficiently broken for him to formulate an answer.  The pain of the effort to return to them was so apparent in his face that the pupils began to be sorry for him and kept up a fire of questions, to save him from the melancholy abstractions to which he lately seemed to have become liable.  The cause of his grief they could not guess, but he was not sure they did not suspect the cause; and so the classes in which he heretofore took so much pleasure came to be dreaded by him.  Every moment except those in which he sat immersed in dreams was a penance and a pain; and at last he pleaded illness, and Mathias took his class, leaving Joseph to wander as far as he liked from the cenoby, which had become hateful to him.

He was often met in the public gardens in Jericho, watching the people going by, vaguely interested and vaguely wearied by the thoughts that their different shows called up in his mind; and he was always painfully conscious that nothing mattered:  that the great void would never be filled up again:  and that time would not restore to him a single desire or hope.  Nothing matters, he often said to himself, as he sat drawing patterns in the gravel with his stick.  Yet he had no will to die, only to believe he was the victim of some powerful malign influence.

One day as he sat watching the wind in the palm-trees, it seemed to him that this influence, this demon, was always moving behind his life, disturbing and setting himself to destroy any project that Joseph might form.  Another day it seemed to Joseph that the demon cast a net over him, and that—­entangled in the meshes—­he was being drawn—­Somebody spoke to him, and he awoke so affrighted that the gossip could hardly keep himself from laughing outright.  If the end of the world were at hand, let the end come to pass! he said; but he did not go to John for baptism.  He knew not why, only that he could not rouse himself!  And it was not till it came to be rumoured in Jericho that a prophet was gone to Egypt to learn Greek that he awoke sufficiently to ask why a Jewish prophet needed Greek.  The answer he got was that the new doctrine required a knowledge of Greek; Greek being a world-wide language, and the doctrine being also world-wide.  As there was but one God for all the world, it was reasonable to suppose that every man might hope for salvation, be he Jew or Gentile.  It seemed to Joseph that this doctrine could only emanate from the young shepherd he had met