=6. Sabbatai resigns his Pretensions.=――The sultan was quite determined to make an end of all this madness. At the end of two months he demanded a miracle of Sabbatai as the price of his release from prison. But it was to be a miracle of the sultan’s own choosing this time. Sabbatai was to be stripped naked, archers were to shoot at him, and his ‘divine’ flesh was to remain proof against their arrows. Now, two months in an uncomfortable dungeon had considerably sobered Sabbatai Zevi. He was not the sort of stuff of which heroes are made, and he had not the slightest ambition to be a martyr. All his audacity ebbed away from him, and he, of course, refused the test. Then, like the coward he was, seeing the game was up, and tired perhaps of the whole thing, he owned that he was nothing but a very commonplace charlatan, who had traded on the credulity of his countrymen. =7. Becomes a Convert to Mahomedanism.=――The confession, humiliating as it was to Sabbatai, did not altogether satisfy the wise sultan. He wanted to make an example of the cheat, and to show his dupes what a poor creature they had believed in. So the sultan said that as Sabbatai had proved himself so bad a Jew, he must try if he could do better as a Mahomedan. Quite cheerfully Sabbatai consented to conversion, and had the effrontery to add that to be a Turk had long been his ambition! And as a Turk, and a rather popular one, this impostor continued to live, and it was in the rather mixed character of a ‘Jew-Turk’ that, some ten years later (1676), he died. BOOK IV. 1591‒1885. DAWN. עַד שֶׁיָּפוּחַ הַיּוֹם וְנָסוּ הַצְּלָלִים SONG OF SOL. ii. 17. ‘_Who counts the billows, when the shore is won?_’ CHAPTER XXXI. DAWN.