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 seven-mouthed 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!' 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 Zionthese were ever prominent to the view of that Hebrew maiden. Gladly would she have trod the whole rome, 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 shrunk from, but rather have gloried in, the distinction of being a most rigid and bigoted Jewess. Her uncle, the younger brother of her deceased father, was, on the contrary, a complete liberal in religion. He came of high lineage among the descendants of Abraham, and certainly prided himself in the unmixed character of his pedigree, which owned no Gentile intermarriage throughout its long and wide ramifications; but he was, to all intents and purposes, a man of the world, prosperous in a lucrative and honourable branch of traffic, devoted to the pursuit of such advantages as he deemed most desirable for his family, and above all things solicitous to see his people relieved from the pressure of civil disabilities, and exalted to a place in the legislature. Confident that this would soon be the result of the efforts in progress, he had brought up his son with a special view to rendering him eligible for such distinctions; and to this end he had liberalized to an extent by no means approved among his stricter brethren; who considered that their young kinsman might occupy his expected station among Gentile sena |