Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a snatched corner of the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a spawn of babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both sexes. But Aaron did not scrape acquaintance with these at first--they lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water. Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him. It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other Jewish passengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman divorced in New York, after the fashion of its Ghetto, and sent back with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in Marseilles. They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now--thank God!--to have its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians, Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them--that which he, Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new acquaintances--the Russian--shared the dream of a Palestine flowing once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a "Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what his formulæ meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage--till the Russian landed at Alexandria--was softened and shortened by sitting worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from Bachja's _Duties of the Heart_ or Saadja Gaon's _Book of the Faith_. There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity