'I am a man and no coward, and I will not abjure the faith of my fathers,' he responded. They held out spurious hopes of pardon would he swear to the pure faith of the Crucified, but Suess remained nobly obdurate. Then the Church--she to whom Christ bequeathed His sweet message of pardon, of tenderness, and of leniency--deserted the faithful Jew, and the law of human cruelty and punishment took hold of him. He was accorded no trial. His sins were as scarlet indeed; besides, he of the despised race had dared to rule. The name Jew was a stigma in itself, and this word the people howled round the tumbril which bore the erstwhile gorgeous favourite to a death of ignominy. A few women in the crowd sighed and shed a tear when they saw the godlike beauty of the man, broken to pathetic ruin by adversity, white-haired, vilified, aged by his degradation; but chiefly the crowd howled and reviled, and the men spat in the Jew's face and covered him with a load of horse-dung and foul ordure. They hung him finally after unspeakable tortures. Then his body was left to rot in Stuttgart's market-place in the sight of all. A hideous carrion dangling in a silver cage, which his judges had caused to be constructed as a terrible warning to those who would profit by the favour of princes. Tragic enough in itself, this story of the downfall of a superb ruler and courtier, the more appalling, when we consider that it was chiefly a cruel triumph of race hatred. No unbaptized Jew in German history has risen to such official eminence as Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, and there is little doubt that, had he not been of the race of Israel, even though he had committed the same crimes, he would not have suffered this fearsome death. CHAPTER XXII REST 'Memories that make the heart a tomb.' THERE is solace to the mourner in the sound of rushing waters; most of all can the stricken soul find a short oblivion in the ceaseless chant of the ocean's mighty surging; and by the tumult of a great river human unrest is soothed ineffably. At Schaffhausen the Rhine falls in giant cascades, roaring and dashing against those rocks which, legend says, Wotan flung into the river in his mighty rage against a poor husbandman who had drowned himself and his lowly wife because her mortal beauty had excited the desire of the amorous wanderer. White, whirling foam, and above a thin, glistening, veil-like mist made of the myriad drops flung up from the water's impact; but here too the eternal poet, Legend, has wrought a delicate phantasy: this mist he calls the breath from the lips of the Rhine-maidens who sing for ever beneath the foam.