victims nearly as many. As the surrounding country lay utterly waste, the only hope of life consisted in keeping steadily with the main body. Among the chief of these dealers Solomon could now detect several of his own nation, and these men seemed perfectly familiar with the chiefs of the banditti. They had also unpleasantly observed Solomon. A messenger invited him to their black tent. Solomon refused, saying: “Am I a dog, to abandon my friends?” “Choose your friends, then, and come,” was the angry reply; and on these conditions Solomon, Don Abraham, Lord Boppo and Prokop, the grave person who arrived with the second party of prisoners, entered the traders’ tent. At once drawing from his robe the small casket, and taking out the soiled and worn parchment, he held it aloft, exclaiming, “Let all the curses denounced against the impious of old be upon your heads, unless you renounce your criminal proceedings!” Then placing the parchment before his breast, he added in Hebrew, in a severe and solemn tone, “Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, the fatherless and the widow. Let all Ebal——” “Nay, rabbi,” loudly interposed the astonished traders, “we are not thus guilty. We have paid our customary money for captives whom these priests of Belial would have sold to Tartars worse than we are. We never dreamed that one of the lights of our own nation was among the number.” Solomon was master. Himself, Don Abraham, Lord Boppo, Prokop and six young men and six young women were at once released. Beyond that he could
