The Bishop strode back to his cloister. As he passed from his garden, he noticed the ragged horde of beggars coming out from the night shelter of Diana’s Temple to range themselves in posture of mendicants whining for alms across the city square. There was a child—a little ragged Greek with no clothing but a torn belted shirt, with tousled head, bare of feet, not more than eight years old, with a baby in a sling on his back. The baby’s eyes had been blinded and one arm broken—to arouse pity among passers-by. Onesimus had noticed these children before; and it made his mountain blood boil, for had not his Lord said—“Let little children come unto me?” And had not the prophets predicted: “A little child shall lead them?” And did this look as if the Shepherd of little children were protecting them; as if the spirit of the child were leading men back to God? It was as if a cloud of doubt suddenly obscured the gladness of the Easter morning. For a moment, he watched the byplay on the city square—the little Greek had stolen a flower from some city hedge. A tall angular spare woman clad all in black had come out of the Diana Temple from an all-night vigil. The child beggar was running along with the blind baby on his back wobbling its head from side to side, trying to sell her the stolen flower for a farthing. He made a clutch at the tall woman’s skirts to try and force her attention. She turned on him with imperious gesture and snatched her skirt from his hand so roughly that the little beggar with the baby on his back fell face down on the Temple steps; then something seemed to clutch at the heart strings of the woman’s own memories; for she paused, turned back and from the wallet in her pocket girdle, threw the child a handful of coins that flashed bronze and gold in the sun. It was as if the cloud of sadness that had obscured the gladness of the Easter morning had vanished like mist in sun. * * * * * Onesimus entered the cloister off the side of his little Christian church. He was tall, thin and athletic from his active life and inheritance of mountain blood. Religion was to him not the old-age anodyne to jaded physical sensations dying of the fungus that kills a fly in frost. It was the essence compounded of more Life and more Light. “Growing old in the Kingdom is growing young,” he smiled. “What have we to fear from old wives’ fables of the dark?” and he flung himself in a stone chair below the cloister window and took up the letter of John to the Seven Churches of the Great Roman Road. Progress had been rapid since he was a slave lad in Rome and Paul wrote on clay and wax tablets. Progress is always swift when we look back, but slow as a snail when we look forward; for John’s letters were on skin parchment.