We now understood the meaning of his strange conduct. The disease began first about the joints and the covered parts of his body. As soon as it broke out on the skin, the poor man had shut himself up to conceal his affliction and to avoid contaminating his family. Knowing himself stricken with a disgusting and incurable malady, which would exclude him from society and drive him away from his children, he bore the burden of his awful secret alone. Magistus had discovered his condition, and anxious to revenge himself upon virtues he could not imitate, and to get possession of the property, he laid the case before the authorities, and insisted that the law of separation should be executed upon his brother-in-law. As the unhappy man stood in the doorway, he turned his eyes upon the pale faces of his terrified children, and, silently wringing his hands, looked upward to heaven. He was turning away, when all three of us sprang forward at once, and with cries which would have moved the coldest heart, fell at his feet and clung about his knees. “Touch me not! my sweet children!” he exclaimed, in a hoarse and feeble voice. “Touch me not. It is all over! Caiaphas will befriend my orphans.” He had not finished the words before several strange domestics, who had rushed in at a signal from Magistus, proceeded to drag us from the spot. “Away with them!” said the hideous old man, fiercely. “Confine them in the farthest room. We want no young lepers—no more scourges of God.” “If it were a scourge of God,” cried I, struggling to escape, “it would have been sent upon you and not upon my noble father.” We were carried weeping out of the courtyard. Looking back to the door, we saw the unhappy man waving his last adieu to us with his poor, sickly, withered hands. The Mosaic law against the unfortunate leper was cruelly severe; but the Roman power which occupied the country and feared the ravages of leprosy among the soldiery, added greatly to its force and to the stringency of its execution. The leper was sentenced to a social and civil death far more terrible to a man of sensibility than the mere separation of soul and body. He was driven from the face of his fellow-men, and dwelt in caves and hollow trees and deserted ruins. No one was permitted to touch him, to approach him, or even to speak to him. He was compelled to cry out, Unclean! unclean! so as to warn every one of his dangerous proximity. He became literally the wild man of the woods and the mountains and the desert—the companion and sometimes the prey of wild beasts. Those who had friends and money had little huts erected for them in remote but safe places, and were amply provided with food and even luxuries by servants who deposited the articles upon the ground at a considerable distance from their habitations. Such was the fate of our good and generous father—the idol of our hearts and the model of all social and heroic virtues.