THE WANDERING JEW.--There are various versions of the story of "The
Wandering Jew," the legends of whom have formed the foundation of
numerous romances, poems and tragedies. One version is that this
person was a servant in the house of Pilate, and gave the Master a
blow as He was being dragged out of the palace to go to His death.
A popular tradition makes the wanderer a member of the tribe of
Naphtali, who, some seven or eight years previous to the birth of the
Christ-child left his father to go with the wise men of the East whom
the star led to the lowly cot in Bethlehem. It runs, also, that the
cause of the killing of the children can be traced to the stories this
person related when he returned to Jerusalem of the visit of the wise
men, and the presentation of the gifts they brought to the Divine
Infant, when He was acknowledged by them to be the king of the Jews,
He was lost sight of for a time, when he appeared as a carpenter who
was employed in making the cross on which the Saviour was to be lifted
up into the eyes of all men. As Christ walked up the way to Calvary,
He had to pass the workshop of this man, and when He reached its
door, the soldiers, touched by the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows,
besought the carpenter to allow Him to rest there for a little, but
he refused, adding insult to a want of charity. Then it is said that
Christ pronounced his doom, which was to wander over the earth until
the second coming. Since that sentence was uttered, he has wandered,
courting death, but finding it not, and his punishment, becoming more
unbearable as the generations come and go. He is said to have appeared
in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even as recently as the eighteenth
century, under the names of Cartaphilus, and Ahasuerus, by which the
Wandering Jew has been known. One of the legends described him as a
shoemaker of Jerusalem, at whose door Christ desired to rest on the