that thrones would crumble and empires fall away. However, the thrust of my keen wit broke its point upon the thick skull of the Phrygian and the Procurator knows not that I did jest with his fears. The Phrygian, however, knows death as well as another, for murder is one-half his trade, I know, and he looked beyond me to the grave-flesh upon the cross and knew it for what it was.
Soon the Jews were hustling back with the order from Pilate to bury the dead, but one of my graves was doomed to emptiness unless I knock the bothersome Annas on the head and tumble him into it, and right well I had a mind to do it. For with those who came from Pilate was a rich Jew named Joseph, who seemed to be of the party of the Galileans to which this Jesus belonged. Anyway, he had a scroll from Pilate commanding me to give him the body of Jesus to be laid in a newly hewn tomb in his garden on the western slopes of Olivet. The Phrygian was come back also with Pilate's signet ring and the command of the Procurator to see the body sealed within the tomb and mount guard upon it for three full days. It was about the eleventh hour and the long march around the city and down the dry bed of a spring brook till we found the way across from the temple and leading up the sides of Olivet to the garden, made it near sunset when the tomb was closed and sealed.
It was not an imposing funeral cortège. My half dozen men muttering over the dusty way, four or five stout fishermen of Galilee who bore the dead, this Joseph of the garden, and the handful of women who talked in low tones and wailed in high ones, and as we climbed the hill were saying how often the Jew himself had come
