calling of his own free will.--[Diodorus I, 91]--It was handed down from
father to son, and he who was born a paraschites--so he was taught--had
to expiate an old guilt with which his soul had long ago burdened itself
in a former existence, within another body, and which had deprived it of
absolution in the nether world. It had passed through various animal
forms, and now began a new human course in the body of a paraschites,
once more to stand after death in the presence of the judges of the
under-world.

Pentaur had crossed the threshold of the man he despised with aversion;
the man himself, sitting at the feet of the suffering girl, had exclaimed
as he saw the priest approaching the hovel:

"Yet another white robe! Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?"

Pentaur had not answered the old man, who on his part took no further
notice of him, while he rubbed the girl's feet by order of the leech; and
his hands impelled by tender anxiety untiringly continued the same
movement, as the water-wheel in the Nile keeps up without intermission
its steady motion in the stream.

"Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?" Pentaur asked himself. "Does it
indeed possess a purifying efficacy, and is it possible that the Gods,
who gave to fire the power of refining metals and to the winds power to
sweep the clouds from the sky, should desire that a man--made in their
own image--that a man should be tainted from his birth to his death with
an indelible stain?"

He looked at the face of the paraschites, and it seemed to him to
resemble that of his father.