THE OTHER WISE MAN

You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how
they travelled from far away to offer their gifts at the
manger-cradle in Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story
of the Other Wise Man, who also saw the star in its rising,
and set out to follow it, yet did not arrive with his brethren
in the presence of the young child Jesus? Of the great desire
of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet
accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the
probations of his soul; of the long way of his seeking and the
strange way of his finding the One whom he sought--I would
tell the tale as I have heard fragments of it in the Hall of
Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of Man.


I

In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and
Herod reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of
Ecbatana, among the mountains of Persia, a certain man named
Artaban. His house stood close to the outermost of the walls
which encircled the royal treasury. From his roof he could look
over the seven-fold battlements of black and white and crimson
and blue and red and silver and gold, to the hill where the
summer palace of the Parthian emperors glittered like a jewel in
a crown.

Around the dwelling of Artaban spread a fair garden, a
tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of