Perhaps this may explain some things in the story.  I have been asked many times why I made the Fourth Wise Man tell a lie, in the cottage at Bethlehem, to save the little child’s life.

I did not make him tell a lie.

What Artaban said to the soldiers he said for himself, because he could not help it.

Is a lie ever justifiable?  Perhaps not.  But may it not sometimes seem inevitable?

And if it were a sin, might not a man confess it, and be pardoned for it more easily than for the greater sin of spiritual selfishness, or indifference, or the betrayal of innocent blood?  That is what I saw Artaban do.  That is what I heard him say.  All through his life he was trying to do the best that he could.  It was not perfect.  But there are some kinds of failure that are better than success.

Though the story of the Fourth Wise Man came to me suddenly and without labor, there was a great deal of study and toil to be done before it could be written down.  An idea arrives without effort; a form can only be wrought out by patient labor.  If your story is worth telling, you ought to love it enough to be willing to work over it until it is true,—­true not only to the ideal, but true also to the real.  The light is a gift; but the local color can only be seen by one who looks for it long and steadily.  Artaban went with me while I toiled through a score of volumes of ancient history and travel.  I saw his figure while I journeyed on the motionless sea of the desert and in the strange cities of the East.

And now that his story is told, what does it mean?

How can I tell?  What does life mean?  If the meaning could be put into a sentence there would be no need of telling the story.

HenryVan Dyke.

You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how they traveled from far away to offer their gifts at the manger-cradle in Bethlehem.  But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not arrive with his brethren in the presence of the young child Jesus?  Of the great desire of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the probations of his soul; of the long way of his seeking, and the strange way of his finding, the One whom he sought—­I would tell the tale as I have heard fragments of it in the Hall of Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of Man.

THE SIGN IN THE SKY

In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Ecbatana, among the mountains of Persia, a certain man named Artaban, the Median.  His house stood close to the outermost of the seven walls which encircled the royal treasury.  From his roof he could look over the rising battlements of black and white and crimson and blue and red and silver and gold, to the hill where the summer palace of the Parthian emperors glittered like a jewel in a sevenfold crown.