"What masquerade is this?" her white lips whispered in indignant revulsion as she struggled from his hold. "My lord, the Sultan, hath made me his door-keeper--_Capigi Bashi Otorak_," he replied deprecatingly. "He is merciful and forgiving. May Allah exalt his dominion. The salary is large; he is a generous paymaster. I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Mohammed is God's prophet." He caught the swooning Melisselda in his arms and covered her face with kisses. XXV News travelled slowly in those days. A week later, while Agi Mehmed Effendi and his wife Fauma Kadin (born Sarah and still called Melisselda by her adoring husband, the Sultan's door-keeper) were receiving instruction in the Moslem religion from the exultant Mufti Vanni, a great Synod of Jews, swept to Amsterdam by the mighty wave of faith and joy, Rabbis and scholars and presidents of colleges, were drawing up a letter of homage to the Messiah. And while the Grand Seignior was meditating the annihilation of all the Jews of the Ottoman Empire for their rebellious projects, with the forced conversion of the orphaned children to Islam, the Jews of the world were celebrating--for what they thought the last time--the Day of Atonement, and five times during that long fast-day did the weeping worshippers, rocking to and fro in their grave-clothes, passionately pronounce the blessing over Sabbataï Zevi, the Messiah of Israel. Nor did the fame and memory of him perish for generations; nor the dreamers of the Jewry cease to cherish the faith in him, many following him in adopting the white turban of Islam. But by what ingenious cabalistic sophistries, by what yearning fantasies--fit to make the angels weep--his unhappy followers, obstinate not to lose the great white hope that had come to illumine the gloom of the Jewries, explained away his defection; what sects and counter-sects his appostasy gave birth to, and what new prophets arose--a guitar-playing gallant of Madrid, a tobacco dealer of Pignerol, a blue-blooded Christian millionaire of Copenhagen--to nourish that great pathetic hope (which still lives on) long after Sabbataï himself, after who knows what new spasms of self-mystification and hypocrisy, what renewed aspirations after his old greatness and his early righteousness, what fresh torment of soul and body, died on the Day of Atonement, a lonely white-haired exile in a little Albanian town, where no brother Jew dwelt to close his eyelids or breathe undying homage into his dying ears--is it not written in the chronicles of the Ghetto? (_Here endeth the Third and Last Scroll._) THE MAKER OF LENSES