The night before Christmas, frosty moonlight, the outcast preacher came down to the island shore and raised his hands to the stars.

“O God! whose word I so long preached in meekness and sincerity,” he cried, “have mercy on my child and its mother, who are poor as were Thine own this morning, eighteen hundred and forty years ago!”

The moonlight scarcely fretted the soft expanse of Chincoteague Bay.  There seemed a slender hand of silver reaching down from the sky to tremble on the long chords of the water, lying there in light and shade, like a harp.  The drowsy dash of the low surf on the bar beyond the inlet was harsh to this still and shallow haven for wreckers and oystermen.  It was very far from any busy city or hive of men, between the ocean and the sandy peninsula of Maryland.

But no land is so remote that it may not have its banished men.  The outcast preacher had committed the one deadly sin acknowledged amongst those wild wreckers and watermen.  It was not that he had knocked a drowning man in the head, nor shown a false signal along the shore to decoy a vessel into the breakers, nor darkened the lighthouse lamp.  These things had been done, but not by him.

He had married out of his race.  His wife was crossed with despised blood.

“What do you seek, preacher?” exclaimed a gruff, hard voice.  “Has the Canaanite woman driven you out from your hut this sharp weather, in the night?”

“No,” answered the outcast preacher.  “My heart has sent me forth to beg the service of your oyster-tongs, that I may dip a peck of oysters from the cove.  We are almost starved.”

“And rightly starved, O psalm-singer!  You were doing well.  Preaching, ha! ha!  Preaching the miracle of the God in the manger, the baby of the maid.  You prayed and travelled for the good of Christians.  The time came when you practised that gospel.  You married the daughter of a slave.  Then they cast you off.  They outlawed you.  You were made meaner, Levin Purnell, than the Jew of Chincoteague!”

The speaker was a bearded, swarthy, low-set man, who looked out from the cabin of a pungy boat.  His words rang in the cold air like dropping icicles articulate.

“I know you, Issachar,” exclaimed the outcast preacher.  “They say that you are hard and avaricious.  Your people were bond slaves once to every nation.  This is the birth night of my faith.  In the name of Joseph, who fed your brethren when they were starving, with their father, for corn, give me a few oysters, that we may live, and not die!”

The Jew felt the supplication.  He was reminded of Christmas eve.  The poorest family on Chincoteague had bought his liquor that night for a carouse, or brought from the distant court-house town something for the children’s stockings.  Before him was one whose service had been that powerful religion, shivering in the light of its natal star on the loneliest sea-shore of the Atlantic.  He had harmed no man, yet all shunned him, because he had loved, and honored his love with a religious rite, instead of profaning it, like others of his race.