"Doubtless—a sermon full of hair-splitting exegesis and devil's webs. I pray you descend and see that my horse be not stolen."
I sprang down with alacrity to obey this his first wish, and, scrambling on the animal, had again a view of the sea of faces, all turned towards the Baal Shem. From the excited talk of the crowd, I gathered that the Baal Shem had just performed one of his greatest miracles. Two brothers had been journeying with their sister in the woods, and had been attacked by robbers. They had been on the point of death when the Baal Shem miraculously appeared, and by merely mentioning the Name, had caused the robbers to sink into the earth like Korah. The sister being too terrified to return with her brothers, the Baal Shem undertook to bring her to Brody himself in his own celestial chariot, which, to those not initiated into the higher mysteries, appeared like an ordinary cart.
Meantime the Master had refilled his pipe. "Is that my old friend David," he cried, addressing one with a cobbler's apron; "and how is business?"
The cobbler, abashed by this unexpected honor, flushed and stammered: "God is good."
"A sorry answer, David; God would be as good if he sent you a-begging. Ha, ha!" he went on cheerily, "I see Joseph the innkeeper has waxed more like a barrel than ever. Peace be to you, Joseph! Have you learnt to read yet? No! Then you are still the wisest man in the town."
By this time some of the Rabbis and magnates in the forefront of the crowd had begun to look sullen at being ignored, but even more pointedly than he ignored these pillars of the commonweal, did the Baal Shem ignore his public reception, continuing to exchange greetings with humble old acquaintances, and finally begging the men between the shafts either to give place again to his horse or to draw him to his daughter's house, whither he had undertaken to convey the woman they saw (who all this time had sat as one in a dream). But on the cries for a sermon persisting, he said:
"Friends, I cannot preach to you, more than my horse yonder. Everything preaches. Call nothing common or profane; by God's presence all things are holy. See there are the first stars. Is it not a glorious world? Enjoy it; only fools and Rabbis speak of the world as vanity or emptiness. But just as a lover sees even in the jewels of his beloved only her own beauty, so in stars and waters must we see only God." He fell a-puffing again at his pipe, but the expectant crowd would not yet divide for his passage. "Ye fools," he said roughly, "you would make me as you have made the Law and the world, a place for stopping at, when all things are but on the way to God. There was once a King," he went on, "who built himself a glorious palace. The King was throned in the centre of what seemed a maze of winding corridors. In the entrance—halls was heaped much gold and silver, and here the folk were content to stay, taking their fill of pleasure. At last the vizier had compassion upon them and called out to them: 'All these treasures and all these walls and corridors do not in truth exist at all. They are magical illusions. Push forward bravely and you shall find the King.'"
But as the crowd still raged about disappointed, pleading for a miracle, the Baal Shem whistled, and his horse flew towards him so suddenly that I nearly fell off, and the crowd had to separate in haste. A paralytic cripple dropped his crutch in a flurry and fell a-running, quite cured.
"A miracle! a miracle!" cried a hundred voices. "God be praised!"
The shout was taken up all down the street, and eager spectators surrounded the joyous cripple, interrogating him and feeling his limbs.