The boy heard the door clank as the Prætorian guard drew the chain across outside and snapped the great twin locks with a key as long as a man’s forearm. He heard the ring of the swift soldier tread as the Idumean strode over the stones for the Three Taverns. Then he turned. The room was dark but for a flickering peat fire on the hearth and a little guttering olive oil wick in a stone or breccia lamp on a rough board table. The floor was softened with sand and earth. The window was high and latticed, but let a soft breeze in from the sea. A little, stooped old man with a white beard and snow white hair and skullcap such as doctors of the law wore, sat on a backless stool at the table, writing on a scroll which he unwound from a roller as he wrote, with his eyes so close to the papyrus that he did not see the boy’s form against the dark of the door. Except for the table and the backless stool there was no furniture in the prison hut but two couches, close together near the door; and the boy noticed that while the prisoner’s right hand wrote and wrote on unheeding, his left arm, resting on the table, had a huge handcuff attached to an iron chain which also lay on the table; and this was the Prophet, whom he had helped the scribe Timothy carry in stoned for dead at Lystra. This was the man, when the wreck broke up at Malta, who stood in the pelting rain and the dark and bade the Lord Julius “be of good cheer” and thanked his strange God “that now at last he could publish the Glad News at Rome.” The boy had not noticed the strange leader of the strange new sect in the Judgment Hall at Cæsarea, because he had been too young, the toy and plaything of the youthful King Agrippa and his younger sister, Bernice, and he had noticed him still less at Lystra, some years before, because he had been still younger and much too excited over the mob. There is a discrepancy here in the boy’s story as picked out of the old records; and yet the discrepancy proves its truth, for he could not have been more than four or five. Yet he distinctly remembered coming in on one of his father’s caravans for Damascus from the South, and seeing the maddened mob, and running with all the camel drivers toward the gates of the city, where he had picked up the insensible Prophet’s cap and helped the young scribe Timothy to shuffle the almost lifeless form through the doors into the house of Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s people, who were Greek merchants.