The Sad Shepherd | Page 3

cut squarely off, and the levelled summit was capped by
a palace of marble, with round towers at the corners and flaring
beacons along the walls; and the glow of an immense fire, hidden in the
central court-yard, painted a false dawn in the eastern sky. All down the
clean-cut mountain slopes, on terraces and blind arcades, the lights
flashed from lesser pavilions and pleasure-houses.
It was the secret orchard of Herod and his friends, their trysting-place
with the spirits of mirth and madness. They called it the Mountain of
the Little Paradise. Rich gardens were there; and the cool water from
the Pools of Solomon plashed in the fountains; and trees of the
knowledge of good and evil fruited blood-red and ivory-white above
them; and smooth, curving, glistening shapes, whispering softly of
pleasure, lay among the flowers and glided behind the trees. All this
was now hidden in the dark. Only the strange bulk of the mountain, a
sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire, loomed across the
night-a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.
The sad shepherd remembered it well. He looked at it with the eyes of a
child who has been in hell. It burned him from afar. Turning neither to
the right nor to the left, he walked without a path straight out upon the
plain of Bethlehem, still whitened in the hollows and on the sheltered
side of its rounded hillocks by the veil of snow.
He faced a wide and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem,
to the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away
from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the
blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like

pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into
a bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The
ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber
along the horizon, and between them he caught a glimpse of the sunken
Lake of Death, darkly gleaming in its deep bed. There was no
movement, no sound, on the plain where he walked, except the
soft-padding feet of his dumb, obsequious flock.
He felt an endless isolation strike cold to his heart, against which he
held the limp body of the wounded kid, wondering the while, with a
half-contempt for his own foolishness, why he took such trouble to
save a tiny scrap of the worthless tissue which is called life.
Even when a man does not know or care where he is going, if he steps
onward he will get there. In an hour or more of walking over the plain
the sad shepherd came to a sheep-fold of gray stones with a rude tower
beside it. The fold was full of sheep, and at the foot of the tower a little
fire of thorns was burning, around which four shepherds were
crouching, wrapped in their thick woollen cloaks.
As the stranger approached they looked up, and one of them rose
quickly to his feet, grasping his knotted club. But when they saw the
flock that followed the sad shepherd, they stared at each other and said:
"It is one of us, a keeper of sheep. But how comes he here in this
raiment? It is what men wear in kings' houses."
"No," said the one who was standing, "it is what they wear when they
have been thrown out of them. Look at the rags. He may be a thief and
a robber with his stolen flock."
"Salute him when he comes near," said the oldest shepherd. "Are we
not four to one? We have nothing to fear from a ragged traveller. Speak
him fair. It is the will of God-and it costs nothing."
"Peace be with you, brother," cried the youngest shepherd; "may your
mother and father be blessed."
"May your heart be enlarged," the stranger answered, "and may all your
families be more blessed than mine, for I have none."
"A homeless man," said the old shepherd, "has either been robbed by
his fellows, or punished by God."
"I do not know which it was," answered the stranger; "the end is the
same, as you see."
"By your speech you come from Galilee. Where are you going? What

are you seeking here?"
"I was going nowhere, my masters; but it was cold on the way there,
and my feet turned to your fire."
"Come then, if you are a peaceable man, and warm your feet with us.
Heat is a good gift; divide it and it is not less. But you shall have bread
and salt too, if you will."
"May your hospitality enrich you. I am your unworthy guest. But my
flock?"
"Let your flock shelter by the south