even his glance carried evil. This was life. He knew no other. Of his
origin he knew nothing except that from the old woman's rambling
outbursts he had gathered that he was of Syrian blood and a homeless
outcast.

But though he had so long trained himself to look downward that it had
at last become an effort to lift his heavily lashed eyelids, there came
a time when he learned that his eyes were not so hideously evil as his
task-mistress had convinced him that they were. When he was only seven
years old she sent him out to beg alms for her, and on the first day of
his going forth she said a strange thing, the meaning of which he could
not understand.

"Go not forth with thine eyes bent downward on the dust. Lift them, and
look long at those from whom thou askest alms. Lift them and look as I
see thee look at the sky when thou knowest not I am near thee. I have
seen thee, hunchback. Gaze at the passers-by as if thou sawest their
souls and asked help of them."

She said it with a fierce laugh of derision, but when in his
astonishment he involuntarily lifted his gaze to hers, she struck at
him, her harsh laugh broken in two.

"Not at me, hunchback! Not at me! At those who are ready to give!" she
cried out.

He had gone out stunned with amazement. He wondered so greatly that when
he at last sat down by the roadside under a fig-tree he sat in a dream.
He looked up at the blueness above him as he always did when he was
alone. His eyelids did not seem heavy when he lifted them to look at the