“I am sending him back to you in his person, and it is as if I sent my own very heart . . . I wished to keep him with me that he might minister to me in my old age and chains, but without your consent I would not; for I wanted it of your free will. Receive him back no longer as a slave, but as brother, dear to me, beloved, as a fellow worker for Christ. If you still regard me as comrade, receive him as myself. If he was ever dishonest, or is in your debt, charge me with the amount. Hold me responsible for the debt on your books. I pledge my signature. I will pay you in full. (I say nothing of the fact you owe me yourself the same amount.) “Yes, beloved, do me this favor for our Lord’s sake. Refresh my joy in Christ. I write you in full confidence. I know you will do more than I say, and provide accommodation for me; for I hope through your prayers I shall be free to come. Greetings from my fellow prisoners, among whom are Mark and Luke. May the graciousness of Christ be in the innermost soul of every one of you. . . .” And though they put the signatures to the letters first in those days, which was a better thing than our custom of having to read through a letter to know who wrote it, the name signed to that letter by a half-blind little old man, ill, and so near death (Nero’s blade was already whetted for the sacrifice), with a chain on his arm in a prison hut, was “PAUL.” CHAPTER II ARDATH, THE FIELD OF FLOWERS Three women sat cooped in the great fortress of Machærus, east of the Dead Sea, peeved that a war for world power had interfered with their own personal plans and petty intrigues. The rose-tinted mountains of Moab rose far to the east, tier on tier above the Desert, dyed in a mystic fire of cloud and light that might have been the abode of gods from eternity. North and south, you could have dropped a pebble from the turret, where the women sat, down precipice sheer as a wall twenty-five hundred feet. West, the clouds boiled a silver sea far below the Fort bastion on the blue and green of deep translucent waters. These waters are to-day known as the Dead Sea. At that time, they were called the Asphaltis Sea owing to the pungent burnt odor of petroleum and sulphur, that came up from their hot springs. Safe as an eagle’s nest above the storm clouds perched the Fort on the mountain height, where rulers’ wives and daughters were housed from stress of war and raid, but angry as an eagle’s young were the strident voices of these pampered favorites of harem and court, that the blood of men flowing deep as the horses’ bridles over at the siege of Jerusalem, should be keeping these caged birds from the garden of joy in life.