There are joys as well as sorrows into which the stranger cannot enter, and which baffle the attempt of the pen to describe; such was that of Lycidas and Zarah when they first met after the battle of Bethsura. The maiden had her happiness tempered indeed with something of anxiety and even alarm, for she beheld the young Greek pale with loss of blood, exhausted by excessive fatigue, and with his left arm in a sling, but her mind was soon relieved, for Lycidas had sustained no serious or permanent injury. The young proselyte was rather glad than otherwise to carry on his person some token of his having fought under Judas Maccabeus, and been one of the foremost of those who had stormed Bethsura. With Zarah and her attendant for his deeply interested listeners, Lycidas gave a graphic and vivid description of the fight. Zarah held her breath and trembled when the narrator came to that thrilling part of his account which described his own position of imminent peril, when he would have been precipitated from the top of the wall, had not Judas Maccabeus come to his rescue. "I deemed that all was over with me," said Lycidas, "when the prince suddenly flashed on my sight! Had I not long since given to the winds the idle fables that I heard in my childhood, I should have deemed that Mars himself, radiant in his celestial panoply, had burst from the cloud of war. But the hero of Israel needs no borrowed lustre to be thrown around him by the imagination of a poet, he realizes the noblest conception of Homer." "And Maccabeus was the one to save and defend you! generous, noble!" murmured Zarah. "Ay, it seems destined that I should be overwhelmed with an ever-growing debt of obligation," cried Lycidas, playfully throwing a veil of discontent over the gratitude and admiration which he felt towards his preserver. "I would that it had been my part to play the rescuer; that it had been _my_ sword that had shielded his head; and that Maccabeus were not fated to eclipse me in everything, even in the power of showing generosity to a rival But I must not grudge him the harvest of laurels," added the young Athenian, with a joyous glance at Zarah, "since the garland of happiness has been awarded to me."