his head than an Englishman would have worn it.  He walked heavily and clumsily inside the railing, and stood before the desk, slowly turning over backward the leaves of the great book.  Then suddenly he began to chant in the Hebrew tongue.  His voice fell mellow and sweet upon the silence, filling it with drowsy sound, as the soft music of a humble-bee will suddenly fill the silence of a woodland glade.  There was no thought, only feeling, conveyed by the sound.

Issachar had gone out, and the Anglican priest sat erect, gazing at the Jew through the fading light, his attention painfully strained by the sense of loneliness and surprise.  From mere habit he supposed the chant to be an introduction to a varied service, but no change came.  On and on and on went the strange music, like a potent incantation, the big Jew swaying his body slightly with the rhythm, and at long intervals came the whisper of paper with the turning of the leaf.

The curate gazed and wondered until he forgot himself.  Then he tried with an effort to recall who he was, and where he was, and all the details of the busy field of labour he had left just outside the door.  He wished that the walls of the square room were not so thick, that some sound from the town might come in and mingle with the chant.  He strained his ear in vain to catch a word of the Hebrew which might be intelligible to him.  He wondered much what sort of a man this Jew might be, actuated by what motives, impelled by what impulses to his lonely task.  All the sorrow of a hope deferred through ages, and a long torture patiently borne, seemed gathered in the cadence; but the man—­surely the man was no refined embodiment of the high sentiment of his psalm!  And still the soft rich voice chanted the unknown language, and the daylight grew more dim.

The curate was conscious that again he tried to remember who he was, and where; and then the surroundings of the humble synagogue fell away, and he himself was standing looking at a jewel.  It was a purple stone, oval-shaped and polished, perhaps about as large as the drop of dew which could hang in a harebell’s heart.  The stone was the colour of a harebell, and there was a ray of light in it, as if in the process of its formation the jewel had caught sight of a star, and imprisoned the tiny reflection for ever within itself.  The curate moved his head from side to side to see if the ray within the stone would remain still, but it did not, turning itself to meet his eye as if the tiny star had a life and a light of its own.  Then he looked at the setting, for the stone was set in steel.  A zigzag-barred steel frame held it fast, and outside the zigzag bars there was a smooth ring, with some words cut upon it in Hebrew.  The characters were very small; he knew, rather than saw, that they were Hebrew; but he did not know what they meant.  All this time he had been stooping down, looking at this thing as if it lay very near the ground.  Then suddenly he noticed