“Take my tongs,” replied the Jew.  “Dip yonder!  It will be your only Christmas gift.”

“Peace to thee on earth and good-will to thee from men!” answered the outcast.

The preacher raised the long-handled rakes, spread the handles, and dropped them into the Sound.  They gave from the bottom a dull, ringing tingle along their shafts.  He strove to lift them with their weight of oysters, but his famished strength was insufficient.

“I am very weak and faint,” he said.  “Oh, help me, for the pity of God!”

The Jew came to his relief doggedly.  The Jew was a powerful, bow-legged man, but with all his strength he could scarcely raise the burden.

“By Abraham!” he muttered, “they are oysters of lead.  They will neither let go nor rise.”

He finally rolled upon the deck a single object.  It broke apart as it fell.  The moonlight, released by his humped shadow, fell upon something sparkling, at which he leaped with a sudden thirst, and cried: 

“Gold!  Jewels!  They are mine.”

It was an iron casket, old and rusty, that he had raised.  Within it, partly rusted to the case, the precious lustre to which he had devoted his life flashed out to the o’erspread arch of night, sown thick with star-dust.  A furious strength was added to his body.  He broke the object from the casket and held it up to eyes of increased wonder and awe.  Then, with an oath, he would have plunged it back into the sea.

The outcast preacher interposed.

“It is your Christmas gift, Issachar. It is a cross. Curse not!  It cannot harm you nor me.  Dip again, and bring me a few oysters, or my wife may die.”

“I know the form of that cross,” said the oyster-man.  “It is Spanish.  Many a year ago, no doubt, some high-pooped galleon, running close to the coast, went ashore on Chincoteague and drifted piecemeal through the inlet, wider then than now.  This mummery, this altar toy, destined for some Papist mission-house, has lain all these years in the brackish Sound.  Ha! ha!  That Issachar the Jew should raise a cross, and on the Christian’s Christmas eve!  But it is mine!  My tongs, my vessel, myself brought it aboard!”

He seized the preacher’s skinny arm with the ferocity of greed.

“I do not claim it, Issachar.  My worship is not of forms and images.  Dip again, and help me to my hut with a few oysters, for I am very faint.  Then all my knowledge and interest in this effigy I will surrender to you.”

“Agreed!” exclaimed the Jew, plunging the tongs to the bottom again and again, in his satisfaction.

They walked inland across the difficult sands, the Jew carrying the crucifix jealously.  Lights gleamed from a few huts along the level island.  At the meanest hut of all they stopped, and heard within a baby’s cry, to which there was no response.  The preacher staggered back with apprehension.  The Jew raised the latch and led the way.