friend to look on at the gay doings in the street, his three sons were
out, all the slaves had leave to enjoy their holiday till midnight;
nothing was likely to disturb them, and so, after many warm expressions
of his deep respect, he found courage to confess to them that he could
not support Ben Jochai's pretensions. His child, he said, clung too
fondly to Alexandria to wish to quit it, and his learned young friend
would be but ill suited with a wife who was accustomed to freer manners
and habits, and could hardly feel herself at ease in a home where the
laws of her fathers were strictly observed, and in which therefore no
kind of freedom of life would be tolerated.

Gamaliel let the Alexandrian speak to the end, but then, as his nephew
was beginning to argue against their host's hesitancy, the old man
abruptly interrupted him. Drawing up his figure, which was a little
bent, to its full height, and passing his hand among the blue veins and
fine wrinkles that marked his high forehead, he began:

Our house was decimated in our wars against the Romans, and among the
daughters of our race Ben Akiba found not one in Palestine who seemed to
him worthy to marry his son. But the report of the good fortune of the
Alexandrian branch of our family had reached Judea, and Ben Akiba thought
that he would do like our father Abraham, and he sent me, his Eliezer,
into a strange land to win the daughter of a kinsman to wife for his
Isaac. Now, who and what the young man is, and the esteem in which he
and his father are held by men--"

"I know well," interrupted Apollodorus, "and my house has never been so
highly honored as in your visit."

"And notwithstanding," continued the Rabbi, "we must return home as we