infirmity, and that I have no eyes wherewith to find my way!" Then said the king to the lame man, "And you, have you been into my garden?" And he answered, "Surely my lord has forgotten my infirmity; it cannot be that he desires to hurt my feelings by mocking me!" So the king was perplexed, and went apart to consider how the two could have contrived the business--for he was sure that they were guilty. At last a thought came to him, and he set the lame man on the blind man's shoulders, and scourged them both together. Then indeed did they cry out, and the lame said to the blind, "Did you not lend me your feet to take me to the king's garden?" And the blind to the lame, "Did you not lend me your eyes to show me the way?" And in like manner at the judgment the soul will say to the body, "I could not have sinned if you had not given me the limbs with which I did evil." And the body to the soul, "But it was you who thought of the evil which I carried out." Thus one will try to throw the blame on the other; but is either of them free from guilt? Others of these apocryphal books are designed to show how important some special virtue, or how dangerous some particular sin, may be. Thus, there is a book called The Testaments (or Last Words) of the Twelve Patriarchs, in which each of the twelve sons of Jacob, when he comes to die, calls his children to him and tells them about his own life, and warns them against his own besetting sin, or shows how he has been helped by practising some good habit: Simeon speaks about envy, Issachar about simplicity, Zebulun about kindness, and so on. And many others there are which are merely, one would say, meant to tell us more about the lives and deaths of the great men of the old times than we can learn from the Bible. Perhaps I have now said enough to show of what sort the tales are that are told in this book--some of them told for the first time in English. They are not true, but they are very old; some of them, I think, are beautiful, and all of them seem to me interesting. In case anyone should wish to know more about them, I will put down here the names of the books from which I have taken them. The first part of the story of Adam is shortened from Mr. S. G. Malan's translation of The Book of Adam and Eve, and from Dillmann's German translation of the same (Das christliche Adambuch des Morgenlandes). The second part is from the Greek Revelation of Moses (in Tischendorf's Apocalypses Apocryphae), and from the Latin Life of Adam, edited by W. Meyer. The first part of the story of Abraham is from The Apocalypse of Abraham, translated from Slavonic by Professor N. Bonwetsch; the second part is from The Testament of Abraham, edited by me in Texts and Studies. The story of Aseneth is from the Greek History of Aseneth, edited by Batiffol in Studia Patristica. The story of Job is taken from The Testament of Job in my Apocrypha Anecdota (ii).