A week after, when the question, he knew, would have been decided one way or the other, he bent his steps again towards his sister’s house. As he walked through the streets he could see that the persecutors were busy at their work. Fires were burning here and there, and copies of the Law and the other holy books were being burned in them. From a house which he recognized as being the dwelling of a scribe of great learning, a party of Greek soldiers burst forth, as he passed, dragging behind them a richly-ornamented scroll of the Psalms. For a moment the wild impulse surged in his heart to rescue the sacred writing from the flames; but he recognized the hopelessness of the attempt; and, indeed, he sadly asked himself, was he fit to be a champion of holy things? A soldier gathered up the parchment in his arms, and tossed it in a heap on the fire. Part of it opened as it fell, and Micah saw for a few moments before the flames reached them, words which he never forgot till his dying day: “Princes have persecuted me without a cause, yet do I not swerve from Thy commandments.” As he stood and looked, with a rage in his heart which he could not express, two more soldiers came out of the house, holding between them the scribe himself, a venerable man, in whom Micah recognized an old friend of his father’s. They threw him down, face foremost, on the fire, and held him there till he was suffocated. But before the tragedy was finished, the young Jew had turned away, feeling in his heart that the question which he had been debating so long was being rapidly settled for him. The blow that was to clinch his conclusions was not long in falling. As he came near the bottom of the little hill on the top of which stood his sister’s house, he saw a cross, and, bound to it by cords, what seemed to be the figure of a woman, with a dead child hung round her neck. The sun had set, and the light was failing with the rapidity that is characteristic of a southern latitude. “Truly these Greeks have a strange way of showing their love of beauty. We have had sickening sights in Jerusalem of late enough to make their name stink in our nostrils for ever. What poor wretch is this? How has she offended our masters? And the child—what treason can he have been guilty of?”