“It’s a very complicated case, but I think he’s coming on all right,” the doctor assured the alarmed old man outside the door.  “He may be a little flighty now and then, but don’t pay any attention to him; just soothe him over.  He’s getting back to himself—­stronger every hour.  We often have these things to contend with.”

And the doctor, outwardly confident, went away to puzzle over the case.

Again the following morning, when Bernal had leaned his difficult way down to the couch in the study, the old man was dismayed by his almost unspeakable aberrations.  With no sign of fever, with a cool brow and placid pulse, in level tones, he spoke the words of the mad.

“You know, grandad,” he began easily, looking up at the once more placid old man who sat beside him, “I am just now recalling matters that were puzzling me much before the sickness began to spin my head about so fast on my shoulders.  The harder I thought, the faster my head went around, until it sent my mind all to little spatters in a circle about me.  One thing I happened to be puzzling over was how the impression first became current that this god of the Jews was a being of goodness.  Such an impression seems to have been tacitly accepted for some centuries after the iniquities so typical of him had been discountenanced by society—­long after human sacrifice was abhorred, and even after the sacrificing of animals was held to be degrading.  It’s a point that escapes me, owing to my addled brain; doubtless you can set me right.  At present I can’t conceive how the notion could ever have occurred to any one.  I now remember this book well enough to know that not only is little good ever recorded of him, but he is so continually barbarous, and so atrociously cruel in his barbarities.  And he was thought to be all-powerful when he is so pitifully ineffectual, with all his crude power—­the poor old fellow was forever bungling—­then bungling again in his efforts to patch up his errors.  Indeed, he would be rather a pathetic figure if he were not so monstrous!  Still, there is a kind of heathen grandeur about him at times.  He drowns his world full of people because his first two circumvented him; then he saves another pair, but things go still worse, so he has to keep smiting the world right and left, dumb beasts as well as men; and at last he picks out one tribe, in whose behalf he works a series of miracles, that devastated a wide area.  How he did love to turn a city over to destruction!  And from the cloud’s centre he was constantly boasting of his awful power, and scaring people into butchering lambs and things in his honour.  Yet, doubtless, that heathen tribe found its god ‘good,’ and other people formed the habit of calling him good, without thinking much about it.  They must have felt queer when they woke up to the fact that they were calling infinitely good a god who was not good, even when judged by their poor human standards.”

Remembering the physician’s instructions to soothe the patient, the distressed old man timidly began—­