heads without a murmur before the unquestioned authority of a legal
judgment. Solomon received unflinchingly the stab that pierced his
heart. No sigh escaped his breast; no tear came to his eyes; his wound
did not bleed. Since his son's arrest he had sold all he possessed in
the world, even the little silver cross left by his wife at her death,
even the pearl necklace that flattered his fatherly pride by losing its
whiteness against his dear Nisida's throat; the pieces of gold gained by
the sale of these things he had sewn into his coarse woollen cap, and had
established himself in the city. He ate nothing but the bread thrown to
him by the pity of passers-by, and slept on the steps of churches or at
the magistrates' door.

To estimate at its full value the heroic courage of this unhappy father,
one must take a general view of the whole extent of his misfortune.
Overwhelmed by age and grief, he looked forward with solemn calmness to
the terrible moment which would bear his son, a few days before him, to
the grave. His sharpest agony was the thought of the shame that would
envelop his family. The first scaffold erected in that gently mannered
island would arise for Gabriel, and that ignominious punishment tarnish
the whole population and imprint upon it the first brand of disgrace. By
a sad transition, which yet comes so easily in the destiny of man, the
poor father grew to long for those moments of danger at which he had
formerly trembled, those moments in which his son might have died nobly.
And now all was lost: a long life of work, of abnegation, and of good
deeds, a pure and stainless reputation that had extended beyond the gulf
into distant countries, and the traditional admiration, rising almost to
worship, of several generations; all these things only served to deepen
the pit into which the fisherman had fallen, at one blow, from his kingly
height. Good fame, that divine halo without which nothing here on earth
is sacred, had disappeared. Men no longer dared to defend the poor