“The emblem is more appropriate to you,” exclaimed the Jew. “For my part. I make the same promise as to the casket itself. There will be, I fear, little probability that the wretches who stole these things left many to claim ownership of what they grasped.”
Pietro deposited the cross within his vesture, and Solomon placed the casket carefully in his wallet. This formal ceremony being completed, they resumed their journey, after enjoying a portion of the provision generously supplied to them by their venerable host of the preceding night.
After advancing some distance in silence, the Jew suddenly halted. “Do you not hear a strange sound from before us,” he asked, “or is it in my own ear? Have I become troubled with extra sensitiveness that has excited my hearing unnaturally, and created the resemblance of sounds where there are none? There are those who would explain my sensation by the motions of the whirring wings of spiritual visitants to this lower sphere. But I have communed with nature through her operations, and especially those manifested in the phenomena of our own share in the universal activities, too long to be thus deluded. I have searched into the methods by which vital action is transmitted through our own frame, and it is not necessary to have recourse to hallucinations outside the workings of our own constituent members, as they are necessarily acted on by the perceptible world around us.” Both men stood and listened, and as they did so an arrow whizzed past them and
