“Listen when his visitors come, and you’ll learn soon enough if you can make anything of their Greek doctrine and Jewish jargon—I can’t. I’m Idumean—Roman—I believe in pikes and swords—in law and gold. One day it’s ‘don’t be insipid’—‘don’t lose your salt’—‘never assume gloomy looks’—‘don’t throw pearls to swine’—‘away with fear’—‘laugh at the sting of death’—‘lead justice to victory’; or else he tells these Jews of Rome they are ‘fatheads and dullwits and grosshearts,’ with which we Romans agree; or else ‘the earth is an inn and death the eternal house to which he has the key to another house of many mansions,’ or he quotes that old Job legend of the Arabs, about ‘flesh renewed as a little child’s’; but you should hear him when the young Timothy comes— ‘It’s Timothy, son, beware the young widows.’ That’s what I call sense. “It would be good advice to you next time a princess with black eyes casts her net at a simpleton! He calls his Christus a Lamb of sacrifice for sin. That’s queer; for I remember nearly forty years ago, when I was your age, I helped to crucify that Christus. Still it’s not so different from the Sacred Bull of Egypt by which the priests get revenue, or the Sacred Lion of Chaldea, or Jupiter of our Sun Temples. Our kings all get revenue by some religious trick hitched up to fear of some god—sun or star or love of war! As I tell you, I’m a plain soldier. I can make nothing of it. I’m for the power of Rome, the law of Rome, the wealth of Rome; there is no power on earth can stand up against it.” The boy sat pondering. He couldn’t forget that little blue flame above the desecrated Altar of the plundered Temple, like the radiance of the Prophet’s brow in the dark. Perhaps all eyes could not see that flame. Perhaps that was what had blinded the Prophet. He’d ask him about that. * * * * * And so the summer ran to winter and the winter to spring again, when the emptied corn ships went back to Greece and Egypt, laden with tin from Britain and hides from Gaul and copper from Spain. The boy saw and pondered much. He was known now among the Jews of Rome as the adopted son of the prisoner. What passed between the boy and the Prophet, only God knows. They were as loving father and more loving son. The Prophet was restless when the boy was out of his sight; and the boy’s eyes followed his master with the mute love of a child for a saint. But fewer and fewer converts came to see the Prophet; for Nero’s mood was darkening toward the new sect; and the believers were scattering to the hills and to the Isles of the Sea before the storm broke.