Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/264

register. “It seems all right,” he said to himself; and, turning once more to Hannah: “Don’t you know that tears are forbidden here? Tell me why you are crying in this happy place.” Then Hannah sobbed out her story: how the patriarch as a child had pinched and teased her, objecting to be washed and dressed, and so forth, until she felt quite sure that he would come to grief; how he had afterwards deceived his schoolfellows and masters, and the authorities of the Church, and how Mar Bûtrus himself had now destroyed her sense of justice by giving the rogue a triumphal entry into heaven. Mar Bûtrus burst out laughing, and patted her on the back, saying: “There, my daughter! go back and take your part in the singing. He’s not so bad as you think him. And as for the triumphal entry, why, there are hundreds of saints like you, thank God, admitted every day, but only once in a thousand years do we get a Patriarch.”

There was once a young priest, who, besides committing to memory the regular liturgies, learned to read a chapter of the Bible in Arabic, which he was fond of reciting to his congregation. It began, “Then the Lord said unto Moses.”

The first time he read it the people were delighted and astonished at his learning; but they soon wearied of hearing the same lesson Sunday after Sunday, and one morning, before service, one of them went into the church and moved the bookmark. When the priest came to that point in the service where he usually introduced his lesson, he