A more limpid evening never breathed upon a lake! he said; and when he raised his eyes a second time they rested on the ravines of Hermon far away in the north, still full of the winter’s snow; and—­being a Galilean—­he knew they would keep their snow for another month at least.  The eagerness of the spring would then be well out of the air; and I shall be thinking, he continued, of returning to Jerusalem and concerning myself once more with Pilate’s business.  But what a beautiful evening! still and pure as a crystal.

A bird floated past, his black eyes always watchful.  The bird turned away to join his mates, and Joseph bade his escort watch the flock:  a bird here and a bird there swooping and missing and getting no doubt sometimes a fish that had ventured too near the surface—­that one leaving his mates, flying high towards Magdala, to be there, he said, in a few minutes, by my father’s house; and in another hour thou shalt be in thy stable, thy muzzle in the corn, he whispered into his horse’s ear; and calling upon his comrades to put their heels into their tired steeds, he turned Xerxes into the great road leading to Tiberias.

But there were some Jews among the escort who shrank from entering a pagan city.  Their prejudices might be overcome with argument, but it were simpler to turn their horses’ heads to the west and then to the north as soon as the city was passed.  The detour would be a long one, but it were shorter than argument:  yet argument he did not escape from, for as they rode through the open country behind Tiberias, some declared that Herod was not a pure Jew; and to make their points clearer they often reined up their horses, to the annoyance of Joseph, who could not bring the discussion to an end without seeming indifferent to the law and the traditions.  But, happily, it had to end before long, for within three miles of Magdala they were riding in single file down deep lanes along whose low dykes the cactus crawled, hooking itself along.  One lane led into another.  A network of deep lanes wound round Magdala, which, judging by the number of new dwellings, seemed to have prospered since Joseph had last seen it.  Humble dwellings no doubt, Joseph said to himself, but bread is not lacking, nor fish.  Then he thought of the wharves his father had built for the boats, and the workshops for the making of the barrels into which the fish was packed.  Magdala owed its existence to Dan’s forethought, and he had earned his right, Joseph thought, to live in the tall house which he had built for his pleasure in a garden amid tall acacia-trees that every breeze that blew up from the lake set in motion.

If ever a man, Joseph thought, earned his right to a peaceable old age amid pleasant surroundings, that man was his father; and he thought of him returning from his counting-house to his spacious verandah, thinking of the barrels of salt fish that he would send away the following week, if the fishers were letting down their nets with fortunate enterprise.