calmer tone, "seeing that the reasons were good—more plainly, seeing it was God’s will that the Child should not be found—I settled my faith into the keeping of patience, and took to waiting." He raised his eyes, full of holy trust, and broke off abstractedly—"I am waiting now. He lives, keeping well his mighty secret. What though I can not go to him, or name the hill or the vale of his abiding-place? He lives—it may be as the fruit in blossom, it may he as the fruit just ripening; but by the certainty there is in the promise and reason of God, I know he lives."
A thrill of awe struck Ben-Hur—a thrill which was but the dying of his half-formed doubt.
"Where thinkest thou he is?" he asked, in a low voice, and hesitating, like one who feels upon his lips the pressure of a sacred silence.
Balthasar looked at him kindly, and replied, his mind not entirely freed from its abstraction,
"In my house on the Nile, so close to the river that the passers-by in boats see it and its reflection in the water at the same time—in my house, a few weeks ago, I sat thinking. A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his fields of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer-time, with space scarce enough to ripen his sowing. The Child, I said further, is now twenty-seven—his time to plant must be at hand. I asked myself, as you here asked me, my son, and answered by coming hither, as to a good resting-place close by the land thy fathers had from God. Where else should he appear, if not in Judea? In what city should he begin his work if not in Jerusalem? Who should be first to receive the blessings he is to bring, if not the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; in love, at least, the children of the Lord? If I were bidden go seek him, I would search well the hamlets and villages on the slopes of the mountains of Judea and Galilee falling eastwardly into the valley of the Jordan. He is there now. Standing in a door or on a hill-top, only this evening he saw the sun set one day nearer the time when he himself shall become the light of the world."
Balthasar ceased, with his hand raised and finger pointing as if at Judea. All the listeners, even the dull servants
