“Their blood sickened me,” answered the lad. “The narrow streets choked me. I could not breathe their yellow air after our Lebanon sunshine. These marshes send up a yellow stench; and the lodging houses stank; and your freedmen loafers are night demons! I’d give all Rome for one night back in Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, or down by the sea at Cæsarea. Your iron-shod hoofs keep me from sleep. I’d give all Nero’s Empire to hear the padded tread of our camels over the turfs where the caravans of Damascus and Chaldea meet!” The Idumean pondered that. He must, then, be the son of some Damascus or Grecian merchant in Asia. Good money and plenty of it in those iron chests! “Know you the ‘Camel Song’ of the sand rovers of Arabia?” he asked. In the starlight he saw tears spring to the long-lashed blue eyes. Sweet to mine ears are the sounds Of thy tinkling bells, O my camel! “And, oh, how the singing sands made melody, my Lord, when the hot winds drove them like sheets of snow!” “Aye, that they do,” returned the old Idumean, “and I would I were where I could hear them sing instead of cooling my heels in Rome waiting for this crazy Prophet to get his head chopped! Much good that will do!” The old man’s manner warmed to desert memories of his native land. “I’ll befriend you. You can stay here. The Prophet needs some one to care for him and cook his meals. He’s growing old. His sight is fading fast. I’ve grown tired of nightly sleeping chained to the arm of a prisoner you could not bribe to run away, while the Emperor takes his pleasure and puts off the acquittal of a man Agrippa wrote was innocent, all because his wife plays the convert to Jerusalem Jews to get a revenue for protecting them, and hates this new sect of Jews that call themselves Christians. You could not pay this prisoner to escape, though fewer and fewer friends come to see him every day. They know the Empress is their enemy and may work Nero to some fresh madness any day. If it were not I value my own head, I’d sometimes believe him myself; but no head of mine for these mad zealots! It takes the iron hand of a Herod to beat out the flame of their sedition, and not the gentle pleading of young Agrippa to bring them to their senses! When the Prophet gets his pardon, if he is wise he’ll haste to Spain and never set foot in Rome or Jerusalem again.” A second draft of wine—for the mountain lad had not touched the fresh tankard—had loosened the old soldier’s tongue. “I mind when I served Herod’s son as a lad like you at Cæsarea and won my freedom in the great gladiatorial combat in the theater, where the sands swam in blood to the knees, with Agrippa the Great sitting clad in his mail of silver, before the owl flew over and brought him ill-omens so that he fell down dead—” “What?” interrupted the boy—“were you once a slave, too, my Lord Julius?”