"O dear Lady Aglais! and O legatus!" she said, with a gesture amazing in its expressiveness and pathetic fervor (she had brought the finger-tips of both hands together under the chin, and then lowered them with the palms outward toward her hearers, and so she stood in an attitude of the utmost grace and dignity combined, like one appealing to the candor and good faith of others)--"O dear friends! I was just now passing through my own garden on my way hither, when, under the fig-tree (where he used to sit poring over the holy books of our people), I beheld my dead father, but standing, and not in his old accustomed wicker-chair; and he gazed upon me with large, earnest eyes; and as he stood, his head almost touched the leaves of that hollow, embowering fig-tree; and he was pale, so extremely pale as he was never during life; and he called me: 'Esther,' he said, and his voice sounded far away. Ah! my God, from what a huge distance it seemed to come! And lo! lady, and thou, legatus, he said these words to me: 'I have been in the vast, dim house, and have seen our Father Abraham; and I have seen our great Lawgiver, and all our prophets, excepting only two, Elias and Enoch; and I asked, Where were they? And in all the dim, vast house none answered me, but the forefinger was pressed to the silent lips of those who there waited. And, suddenly, there was the noise of innumerable armies coming swiftly from afar--but your ears are mortal and your eyes veiled, and were I even permitted to tell you that which shook, beyond this little world, the large world and its eternal thrones, your mind would not at present understand my words. Enough, Esther, that I have been allowed to renew to you, in my own behalf, and that of others among our people who have been called before you to the vast, dim, silent city, the exhortation which our ancestor Judas Maccabeus sent with offerings to the high-priest; namely, that you will pray for our spirits. Our innumerable company has just been thinned; the glorious Judas Maccabeus, our ancestor, and that holy mother of the Maccabees, and almost all who were waiting with me in the dim, vast kingdom of expectation, have gone for ever; and I, and a few, have been commanded to expect yet a little time; until the incense of holy prayer shall have further gone up in the presence of the Great White Throne.'" Esther paused, her eyes dilated, and stood a moment with the hands again brought together; and so perfect a figure of truthfulness, and such an impersonation of sincerity, she looked, that the Jewish servant, who understood not a word of the tongue in which she addressed the Greek lady and her son, gazed at her; his work suspended, his cask held high in air, with all the marks of one who heard and accepted some sacred and unquestionable revelation. "Go on, dear child," said Aglais. "What passed further?"