Saul of Tarsus Author:Elizabeth Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE FIRST MARTYR Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and ch... more »ill winds. Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur. Above it the leaning cedars, newly- tipped with verdure, spread their peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with undulating vapors, smoky and illusory. The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers. Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun. It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where the ancient green wall cut offthe streaming wind, was a group sitting close together on the earth. One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab. Next to him a Jewish husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coarse smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard brown feet. His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany. One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a...« less