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Show 118 BY PATH AND TRAIL. Him, and fling Him to the mob. Why, only for me, the fools would not have whipped Him, pressed the crown on His head, put a reed in His hand for a scepter and a scar let cloak on his bleeding shoulders and, amid laughter and insult, made a mock king of Him. " You remember His features, the expression on His face when He hung on the cross and cried aloud to His Father : * ' My God, My God, hast Thou abandoned me ! ' ' questioned the Spaniard. " As if His vile death happened yesterday. " Could you and will you paint for me the face, and the expression on the face as you saw them immediately before He said: ' All is consummated/ and when dark ness was falling on Calvary and Jerusalem? " " I can and will. " " Well, then, do I beseech you, before I sign our com pact. Here is the brush and here the palette. ' ' Lucifer took the brush and paints, and when in a few moments he handed them back the face of Jesus Christ stood out upon an ebony background. It was a face full of tenderness, of infinite pathos, of unspeakable pity, of boundless compassion; but on it, deeply graven in the flesh, were lines of awful suffering, the seamings of sor row and sustained agony. The Spaniard, as he gazed upon the " Santo Bostro," the Divine Face, trembled as trembles the man to whom the dead speaks. The eyes of the Holy Face looked into his own; he was standing be fore a Christ that was not yet dead, but whose body lay limp, and from which the blood was pouring from a gash in the side and trickling from wounds in the head and hands. From out the closing lids, the eyes, glazed with approaching death, looked down upon him in sorrow and infinite pity. The face and figure were so heart- rending |