come thou wilt allow me to relate myself to thee as father to son, in
all things a help, in nothing a burden.

"Again, O Son of Jahdai, to thee and thine--Peace!"

[Seal.]

The son of Jahdai, at the conclusion of the reading, let his hands fall
heavily in his lap, while he plunged into a study which the messenger
with his foreign airs could not distract.

Very great distance is one of the sublimities most powerful over the
imagination. The letter had come from an Island he had never heard
named. An Island in the Over-Sea which doubtless washed the Eastern end
of the earth, wherever that might be. And the writer! How did he get
there? And what impelled him to go?

A chill shot the thinker's nerves. He suddenly remembered that in his
house there was a cupboard in a wall, with two shelves devoted to
storage of heirlooms; on the upper shelf lay the _torah_ of immemorial
usage in his family; the second contained cups of horn and metal, old
phylacteries, amulets, and things of vertu in general, and of such
addition and multiplication through the ages that he himself could not
have made a list of them; in fact, now his attention was aroused, he
recalled them a mass of colorless and formless objects which had ceased
to have history or value. Amongst them, however, a seal in the form of a
medallion in gold recurred to him; but whether the impression upon it
was raised or sunken he could not have certainly said; nor could he have
told what the device was. His father and grandfather had esteemed it
highly, and the story they told him about it divers times when he was a