often go to theatres. They looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box, with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell back fainting in the arms of her friends.
The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence against him, and also delivers Demás to the law, but is himself denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation, and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better, because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew woman or child.
The Calle de Amargura--the Street of Bitterness--was the next scene. First came a long pro-
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cession of official Romans,--lictors and swordsmen, and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demás appears, dragged along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow from the Madonna, and a most curious scene of the Wandering Jew. This worthy, who in defiance of tradition is called Samuel, is sitting in his doorway watching the show, when the suffering Christ begs permission to rest a moment on his threshold. He says churlishly, Anda!--"Begone!" "I will go, but thou shalt go forever until I come." The Jew's feet begin to twitch convulsively, as if pulled from under him. He struggles for a moment, and at last is carried off by his legs, which are moved like those of the walking dolls with the Greek names. This odd tradition, so utterly in contradiction with the picture the Scriptures give us of the meek dignity with which the Redeemer forgave all personal injuries, has taken a singular hold upon the imaginations of all peoples. Under varying names,---
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Ahasuerus, Salathiel, le Juif Errant, der ewige Jude,--his story is the delight and edification of many lands; and I have met some worthy people who stoutly insisted that they had read it in the Bible.