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of them
became builders along the Nile."
    By a simultaneous impulse the three joined hands.
    "Could anything be more divinely ordered?" Balthasar continued.
"When we have found the Lord, the brothers, and all the generations
that have succeeded them, will kneel to him in homage with us. And
when we part to go our separate ways, the world will have learned
a new lesson—that Heaven may be won, not by the sword, not by
human wisdom, but by Faith, Love, and Good Works."
    There was silence, broken by sighs and sanctified with tears;
for the joy that filled them might not be stayed. It was the
unspeakable joy of souls on the shores of the River of Life,
resting with the Redeemed in God's presence.
    Presently their hands fell apart, and together they went out of
the tent. The desert was still as the sky. The sun was sinking
fast. The camels slept.
    A little while after, the tent was struck, and, with the remains of
the repast, restored to the cot; then the friends mounted, and set
out single file, led by the Egyptian. Their course was due west,
into the chilly night. The camels swung forward in steady trot,
keeping the line and the intervals so exactly that those following
seemed to tread in the tracks of the leader. The riders spoke not
once.
    By-and-by the moon came up. And as the three tall white figures sped,
with soundless tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like
specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before
them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame;
as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of
dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled;
and they shouted as with one voice, "The Star! the Star! God is
with us!"

Chapter VI
*
    In an aperture of the western wall of Jerusalem hang the "oaken
valves" called the Bethlehem or Joppa Gate. The area outside of
them is one of the notable places of the city. Long before David
coveted Zion there was a citadel there. When at last the son of
Jesse ousted the Jebusite, and began to build, the site of the
citadel became the northwest corner of the new wall, defended by
a tower much more imposing than the old one. The location of the
gate, however, was not disturbed, for the reasons, most likely,
that the roads which met and merged in front of it could not
well be transferred to any other point, while the area outside
had become a recognized market-place. In Solomon's day there was
great traffic at the locality, shared in by traders from Egypt
and the rich dealers from Tyre and Sidon. Nearly three thousand
years have passed, and yet a kind of commerce clings to the spot.
A pilgrim wanting a pin or a pistol, a cucumber or a camel, a house
or a horse, a loan or a lentil, a date or a dragoman, a melon or
a man, a dove or a donkey, has only to inquire for the article at
the Joppa Gate. Sometimes the scene is quite animated, and then
it suggests, What a place the old market must have been in the
days of Herod the Builder! And to that period and that market
the reader is now to be transferred.
    Following the Hebrew system, the meeting of the wise men described
in the preceding chapters took place in the afternoon of the
twenty-fifth day of the third month of the year; that is say,
on the twenty-fifth day of December. The year was the second of
the 193d Olympiad, or the 747th of Rome; the sixty-seventh of
Herod the Great, and the thirty-fifth of his reign; the fourth
before the beginning of the Christian era. The hours of the day,
by Judean custom, begin with the sun, the first hour being the
first after sunrise; so, to be precise; the market at the Joppa
Gate during the first hour of the day stated was in full session,
and very lively. The massive valves had been wide open since dawn.
Business, always aggressive, had pushed through the arched entrance
into a narrow lane and court, which, passing by the walls of
the great tower, conducted on into the city. As Jerusalem is
in the hill country, the morning air