brain, sharp as a needle, and she flung herself madly in pursuit.

Before coming abreast of him she followed, however, she slackened her pace and overtook him without the semblance of haste. She plucked at his robe. "Hast forgotten me?" she asked, and her heart knocked at her throat, her soul turned sick within her, but she brought a slow smile bravely to her eyes.

He brushed her angrily to one side as if he thought her a beggar. But in a glance he remembered and his face flared up with passion. “Ah, fruit of the pomegranate, hast thou followed me hither to offer again what thou didst so strangely deny me," he said; "come, we will go to thy house and sup. is work before me tonight. I must be gone in an hour." Once more he swept his powerful arm about her beautiful body, and they turned upon their steps.

But we must haste; there

The new moon brightened, whitening the weather dulled houses of Nahum. The people slept. Along the road into Jerusalem plodded a solitary figure, his feet sinking inches deep in the heavy dust. Within the khan of Soshoh there lay a man in a drunken stupor, his head upon the table in front of him, an empty wine-skin under his hand. But through the door of the house beneath the trees of balsam there issued no man forth.

III

Day broke, and the sun, a disk of burnished copper, hung just clear of the horizon. And in the fields along the highway out of the village a hundred sickles flashed in the early morning light.

At the first cross-road, not two thousand paces beyond

the confines of Nahum, there was gathered a group of men having one woman in their midst. Before them but facing directly away from them a figure bent to the ground and moved his forefinger through the dust as if he wrote. The woman stood nearest him, both hands held tightly in the grip of a man on each side. Her garments were much soiled and rent so that they served none too well to conceal her softly rounded limbs, her splendid hips and voluptuous breasts. But in spite of being thus ignominiously handled, she carried her head stiffly erect, and her face, though white and drawn with suffering, shone with mingled awe and pride.

One who held her, a short, swarthy man whose words struck the ear in tones hollow with insincerity, addressed himself to him who wrote upon the ground, saying, "Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded that such should be stoned. But what sayest thou?"

He who wrote in the dust continued to write for a long space, so long that those who were gathered about began to pick up stones from the roadside that they might chastise her whom they had taken in adultery. But presently there spoke the voice that, the day before, had swayed the multitude. It was low and unmoved but of a timbre that struck dumb with terror those who had made accusation: "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."

And there was for answer only the thud of stones being dropped in the dust.

T

THOMAS

BY HENRY GOODMAN

I

HE river is the only successful rebel in all that stretch of red-earthed, scarred country. Else

where, on the hillside, as if made by galling chains, deep fissures show where the earth has made successive, foiled attempts to break from the harsh fetters of barrenness; heavy, gnarled roots of crippled trees are black, mute witness to broken efforts of escape from the stern bondage that holds trees and hills in merciless control.

But the river is free. And there can be no doubt that the sun-filled, yellowish waters know and take delight in their freedom. Anyone watching from the banks with their deep crevices where the river thrusts teasing, sinuous fingers, could tell this from his swirling, and splashing and rippling. At one turn in his swift course he leaps gleefully upon the sharp rocks as if to show by his mad abandon that he holds in a superior disdain even these steadfast, immovable obstructors.

And, as if not content with merely giving rein to his joyous satisfaction in this simple gayety of movement, the river sends out a murmuring proclamation of his free estate. For miles away on either side of the streamup on the steep slopes whose noses rest by the riverside

and in the low flats that form among the hills—the voice of the rebel is heard. And to some upon whom the desolation and barrenness of the land spread a darkness over the heart, this voice with its gay teasing is like a glowing, soft light.

Everywhere else in that country a stern Nature is mistress. She is severe and repressive as one may judge from the warped and crippled trees, and the heaps of stone that strew the hillsides to keep the earth from protesting in her many tongues of defiant, tender grass. Like a mother who becomes harsh and oppressive for fear that her children may leave her in their growing strength and development, she has laid a cruel magic of inhibition on trees and grass, on flower and even on

man.

Thomas was the exception. He was the exception in this as also in the very essence of his being. From the time his mother had hired him out to the Candlers he had quite forgotten her existence as he had long forgotten the lack of a father. Two beings, however, he did not forget: Snap, his short-tailed fox terrier whom he had saved from the rapids in the river, and the river himself. These two he loved with all the devotion of his inarticulate, insatiable yearning. Snap he would press to his heart with a crushing, impulsive hug, and to the river he spoke daily his love.

Every day he would steal down to the laughing, heedless stream and seat himself quietly beneath the berry bushes by the shore. Their ripe, juice-moist fruit dropped with a soft thud at intervals. As he sat there it seemed to him that the berries fell in tribute to the river. At first he could not speak his own gratitude. Then slowly confidence won over his shyness and he would

move lightly about, until one day his courage, like a warming juice within him, moved him to whistle. Gradually the halting, dry and frightened notes turned to a liquid, rippling sound, and that day he even advanced so far as to bend down to the river and with shy, hesitant fingers touch the glancing waters. From the shadow of the overhanging bank an unsuspecting minnow moved out and nipped at his fingers. A thrill charged into the body of the boy. The river had answered him, had accepted his worship.

His visits to the river were his prayers. Therefore he smiled even when at work, and this it was, rather than anything he failed to do, which brought upon him the bitter, constant dislike of his master, Joel Candler.

Mr. Candler was thin and tall. His startled gray eyes had in them the sharp glints one sees in broken rocks. Year-long gazing on hard, barren hills had driven hardness into his eyes and had filled him with a bitterness against everything and everyone who was free and at peace with himself. He looked askance at Thomas.

But to Tom, his master's feelings were of little concern. He would watch Mr. Candler, thin and wiry of frame to gauntness, hard and gnarled of hands and face, with the same internal dissatisfaction as he looked upon the cancer-eaten trees about the square court back of the house. His disregard of his master's bitterness was part of his defense against the impelling, subversive control of nature round about. Looking at Mr. Candler, he would wonder: "Why doesn't he shake off his constant round of work, work, work all day long? Why doesn't he cut down these thin, gasping trees? Why doesn't he leave this place?" And there would form in Tom's mind sets of images in which pulsing waters ran through green