A strange feeling crept over Delecresse when he heard his fate, for life or death, thus placed in the hands of the man whose life he had wrecked. Anselm was heard to run off quickly, and in a few minutes he returned. "Sir Richard the Earl laughed a jolly laugh when I told him," was his report. "He saith, Let the cur be, if he will not be plucked forth until Monday morning: for if Saturday be his Sabbath, Sunday is mine, and what will defile the one will defile the other." [This part of the story is historical.] "Monday morning! He will be a dead man, hours before that!" "So he will. It cannot be helped, except--Jew, wilt thou be pulled out now, or not? If not now, then not at all." For one moment, the heart of Delecresse grew sick and faint within him as he contemplated the awful alternatives presented to his choice. Then, gathering all his strength, he shouted back his final decision. "No! I will not break the Sabbath of my God." The men outside laughed, uttered an expression of contemptuous pity, and he heard their footsteps grow faint in the distance, and knew that he was left to die as horrible a death as can befall humanity. Only one other cry arose, and that was not for the ears of men. It was the prayer of one in utter error, yet in terrible extremity: and it was honestly sincere. "Adonai! I have sinned and done evil, all my life long. Specially I have sinned against this man, who has left me to die here in this horrible place. Now therefore, O my God, I beseech Thee, let the sufferings of Thy servant be accepted before Thee as an atonement for his sin, and let this one good deed, that I have preferred death rather than break Thy law, rise before Thee as the incense with the evening sacrifice!" Yes, it was utter error. Yet the Christians of his day, one here and there excepted, could have taught him no better. And what had they offered him instead? Idol-worship, woman-worship, offerings for the dead,--every thing which the law of God had forbidden. In the day when the blood of the martyrs is demanded at the hand of Babylon, will there be no reckoning for the souls of those thousand sons of Israel, whom she has persistently thrust away from Christ, by erecting a rood-screen of idols between Him and them? When day dawned on the Monday, they pulled out of the cess-pool the body of a dead man.