It was the secret orchard of Herod and his friends, their trysting-place with the spirits of mirth and madness.  They called it the Mountain of the Little Paradise.  Rich gardens were there; and the cool water from the Pools of Solomon plashed in the fountains; and trees of the knowledge of good and evil fruited blood-red and ivory-white above them; and smooth, curving, glistening shapes, whispering softly of pleasure, lay among the flowers and glided behind the trees.  All this was now hidden in the dark.  Only the strange bulk of the mountain, a sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire, loomed across the night-a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.

The sad shepherd remembered it well.  He looked at it with the eyes of a child who has been in hell.  It burned him from afar.  Turning neither to the right nor to the left, he walked without a path straight out upon the plain of Bethlehem, still whitened in the hollows and on the sheltered side of its rounded hillocks by the veil of snow.

He faced a wide and empty world.  To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away from him.  Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the blue-black of the sky.  They diminished and receded till they were like pin-holes in the vault above him.  The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote.  The ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber along the horizon, and between them he caught a glimpse of the sunken Lake of Death, darkly gleaming in its deep bed.  There was no movement, no sound, on the plain where he walked, except the soft-padding feet of his dumb, obsequious flock.

He felt an endless isolation strike cold to his heart, against which he held the limp body of the wounded kid, wondering the while, with a half-contempt for his own foolishness, why he took such trouble to save a tiny scrap of the worthless tissue which is called life.

Even when a man does not know or care where he is going, if he steps onward he will get there.  In an hour or more of walking over the plain the sad shepherd came to a sheep-fold of gray stones with a rude tower beside it.  The fold was full of sheep, and at the foot of the tower a little fire of thorns was burning, around which four shepherds were crouching, wrapped in their thick woollen cloaks.

As the stranger approached they looked up, and one of them rose quickly to his feet, grasping his knotted club.  But when they saw the flock that followed the sad shepherd, they stared at each other and said:  “It is one of us, a keeper of sheep.  But how comes he here in this raiment?  It is what men wear in kings’ houses.”

“No,” said the one who was standing, “it is what they wear when they have been thrown out of them.  Look at the rags.  He may be a thief and a robber with his stolen flock.”