Nobody in Capernaum could remember having heard such a Rabbi. The Sabbaths when Jesus spoke, the Synagogue was full, the crowd overflowed out on the street, everybody was there who could come. The gardener comes, who for that day had left his spade, and no longer turned his water wheel to irrigate the green rows of his garden, and the smith, the good country smith, black with smoke and dust every day, but on the Sabbath washed, neatly dressed, his face still a little dusky, although scrubbed and rinsed in many waters like his hands, with his beard combed and anointed with cheap ointment (but still perfumed like a rich man’s beard), the smith all whose days are spent before the fire, sweaty and dirty except this day which is the Sabbath, when he comes to the Synagogue to hear the ancient word of the Ancient of Days, the God of his fathers. He comes devoutly, but he comes too because his family, his friends, his neighbors come there, and he finds them all together, and he comes also because the day is long (all that long holiday without any work, without any hammer in his hand, without the pincers) and in Capernaum there is nothing to do on Sabbaths except go to the Synagogue. The mason comes, he who has worked on this little house of the Synagogue and made it small because the Elders—good, God-fearing people, but inclined to be stingy—did not wish to spend too much. The mason still feels his arms a little numb and lame from his six days’ labor, no longer keeps track of the stones which he has laid in courses and the trowels full of mortar which he has thrown between the stones during the week. The mason puts on his new clothes to-day and sits down on the ground, he who on all other days stands upright, active, watchful so that the work may go well, and the employer be satisfied; the good mason too has come to the house which seems to him partly his own. The fishermen have come too, the young and the old, both of them with faces tanned by the sun and with eyes half-shut from the constant glare of sunlight reflected by the water. (The old man is handsomer because of the contrast of his white hair and white beard with his weather-beaten and wrinkled face.) The fishermen have turned over their boats on the sand, have left them tied to a stake, have spread the nets on the roof and have come to the Synagogue, although they are not used to being within walls and perhaps continue to hear a confused murmur of water lapping about the bow.