At the head of the column a young man, in ample robes, with his kerchief skirts hanging close about his face, stepped aside from the line of advance. The crowd took up motion and went on. Marsyas had washed himself in obedience to the Law; he had brought in his hand his trespass offering, and in his soul he was a Jew. But he stood now, and watched the fours of people climb the steps abreast, with no mood in his heart that a man should carry into a sanctuary. Series after series passed under his sharp scrutiny--extremes of rank, of reputation, of calling and of kind. Minute after minute the long, silent procession tramped by him and was swallowed up in the gigantic gloom within. Ever the alert gaze, bright even under the obscuring shadow of the kerchief, slipped from rank to rank, and never once lingered in doubt. No one looked at him; every eye was down, for though, since the eighth day after his birth, no man in the long stream of worshipers had been ignorant of the Temple, it never failed to be a place of awe, half-love, half-terror. The hindmost appeared at the angle of the Temple, moved in turn after their fellows, climbed the steps and disappeared. Stragglers followed, in groups and singly, and finally Marsyas turned up the steps and followed the last within. Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, would have been among the earliest to arrive. Perhaps by special dispensation he had entered before the multitude and by another gate. The keeper at the Gate Beautiful glanced at the young man's snow-white Essenic garments and at the stamp of Jewish blood on his face, and passed him without a word. The Temple from the city had been a great glittering unit. But on approaching its details, they became bewildering. Within was a tremendous inclosure, floored with agate, galleried with immense chambers which were screened with grills of beaten brass. The army of worshipers was reduced, in comparison to the space they entered, to a mere handful of pygmy, indistinct shapes, prostrate, kneeling, upright, silent, infinitesimal, moveless. At the extreme inner end of the men's court was a flight of fifteen semicircular steps which led up to the Gate Nicanor, now wide. It was hung in the middle of an open arcade--an altar screen no less a grace to the Temple because it might have embattled a fortress. Beyond it as the eye pierced the holy gloom, was a second tier of courts, less spacious than the first, but no less magnificent; after it, yet a third, and then a massive pile of ancient brass, stained and smoked, arose above all else before it. A tongue of clean blue unilluminating flame wavered in the center of its summit. Beyond that, Marsyas' gaze did not travel. Spiritual subjection surrounded him; from behind the lattice which screened the women's court in the lofty galleries, there came no sound. The twilight of early morning and the hush of a sanctity were supreme.