fetch him a little water from the rock; which Joseph did. After having
drunk a little the hermit seemed to revive, and Joseph related how he
missed Jesus on the bank and had no tidings of him except that he was
gone into the desert to meditate. But the desert is large, and I know
not which side of the lake he has chosen. To which Banu answered: John
is baptizing in the Jordan; get thee baptized and repent! On which he
reached out his hand to his store of locusts, and while munching a few
he added: the Baptist is greater than Jesus, and he is still baptizing.
Get thee to Jordan! At this Joseph took offence and returned to the
cenoby with the intention of resuming his teaching. But he was again so
possessed of Jesus that he could not keep his mind on the lesson before
him: a pupil was often forced to put a question to him in a loud voice,
and perhaps to repeat it, before Joseph's sick reverie was sufficiently
broken for him to formulate an answer. The pain of the effort to return
to them was so apparent in his face that the pupils began to be sorry
for him and kept up a fire of questions, to save him from the melancholy
abstractions to which he lately seemed to have become liable. The cause
of his grief they could not guess, but he was not sure they did not
suspect the cause; and so the classes in which he heretofore took so
much pleasure came to be dreaded by him. Every moment except those in
which he sat immersed in dreams was a penance and a pain; and at last he
pleaded illness, and Mathias took his class, leaving Joseph to wander
as far as he liked from the cenoby, which had become hateful to him.

He was often met in the public gardens in Jericho, watching the people
going by, vaguely interested and vaguely wearied by the thoughts that
their different shows called up in his mind; and he was always painfully
conscious that nothing mattered: that the great void would never be
filled up again: and that time would not restore to him a single desire
or hope. Nothing matters, he often said to himself, as he sat drawing