likes teaching him, for he is a clever but oft-times an idle boy. I
don't know that I should have said idle, she added, and sat thinking of
what word would describe Joseph's truancy better than idle, without,
however, finding the word she needed, and her thoughts floated away into
a long consideration of her son's anger, for she could see he was angry
with Azariah. But the cause of his anger she could not discover. It
could not be that he was annoyed with Azariah for coming to complain
that he was often kept waiting: and it was on her tongue to ask him why
he was so gloomy, why he knitted his brows and bit his lips. But she
held back the question, for it would not be long before Dan would let
out his secret: he could not keep one. And Dan, knowing well his own
weakness and his mother's shrewdness (she would soon be guessing what
was passing in his mind), began to animadvert on Azariah for his
residence in Tiberias, a pagan city--his plan for leading her on a false
trail. Others, he said, spoke more unfavourably than he did; and he
continued in this strain until Rachel, losing patience, interrupted him
suddenly saying that Azariah did not live in Tiberias. If not in
Tiberias, he answered, in a suburb, and within a stone's throw of the
city walls. But what has that got to do with Joseph? Rachel asked. What
has it got to do with Joseph! Dan growled, when to reach the scribe's
house he has to pass through lanes infested with the off-scourings of
the pagan world: mummers, zanies, jugglers, dancers, whores from
Babylon. Did ye not hear him, woman, describe these lanes, saying that
he had to change his course three times so that he might keep his
promise to Azariah, and are ye not mindful that he told me, and you
sitting there listening on that very stool, that the showmen he met in
Argob orchard put a spell upon him, and that it was the demon that had
obtained temporary lodgment in him that had bidden him to Tiberias to
see the cock-fight: Jews from Alexandria, heretics, adventurers,
beggars, aliens! Look ye here, Dan, Rachel said, he is a proud boy and