JUDAH'S LION. CHAPTER I. 'Он, cousin Alick, how I do envy you!' said Esther Cohen, with a sigh. 'I can believe it, my poor little coz,' replied the person addressed. Compared with town itself, this, to be sure, is a free place, where you may breathe and glance round you: but what a look-out one will have from the mast-head of a tall ship, over the rich blue waters of the Mediterranean, with its clusters of isles, all immortalized in song. And then for the sandy desert, the high mountain-top, the dark ravine, the deep defile, the broad majestic waters of the sevenmouthed river, and all the untold wonders of nature and art, that lie outspread beneath the ken of travellers so enterprising, so sagacious, so classically and scientifically accomplished as your redoubtable cousin Alick!' B But it was for none of these things that Esther Cohen sighed; her fancy had indeed pictured the track that she had just seen her uncle point out on a chart with the features referred to by Alick, and very attractive they would have been in her eyes had not all other considerations been lost in the paramount one which evidently was omitted in her kinsman's catalogue of anticipated delights. Syria— Palestine-Mount Zion-these were ever prominent to the view of that Hebrew maiden. Gladly would she have trod the whole route, a fettered and blindfolded captive, to have found herself at the end of it within sight of Jerusalem, with permission to weep over its departed glories. Her thought by day, her dream by night, was of the dispersion, the degradation of her people; and while the occasional outbursts of higher patriotism which she could not control were good-humouredly smiled at, and herself regarded as a pretty enthusiast by the members of her uncle's household, she was altogether isolated in the midst of them, by the consciousness that this, the deepest feeling of her heart, was totally unshared. Reading, meditation, and a strict attention to all the prescribed forms of her religion were therefore the elements on which her zeal was chiefly fed and Esther Cohen, though amiable in a high degree, and universally beloved by all around her, would not have shrank from, but rather have gloried in, the distinction of being a most rigid and bigotted Jewess. Her uncle, the younger brother of her deceased |