 great care to conceal from the
Christians amongst whom they dwelt.
    The beautiful Rebecca had been heedfully brought up in all the knowledge
proper to her nation, which her apt and powerful mind had retained, arranged,
and enlarged, in the course of a progress beyond her years, her sex, and even
the age in which she lived. Her knowledge of medicine and of the healing art had
been acquired under an aged Jewess, the daughter of one of their most celebrated
doctors, who loved Rebecca as her own child, and was believed to have
communicated to her secrets, which had been left to herself by her sage father
at the same time and under the same circumstances. The fate of Miriam had indeed
been to fall a sacrifice to the fanaticisms of the times; but her secrets had
survived in her apt pupil.
    Rebecca, thus endowed with knowledge as with beauty, was universally revered
and admired by her own tribe, who almost regarded her as one of those gifted
women mentioned in the sacred history. Her father himself, out of reverence for
her talents, which involuntarily mingled itself with his unbounded affection,
permitted the maiden a greater liberty than was usually indulged to those of her
sex by the habits of her people, and was, as we have just seen, frequently
guided by her opinion, even in preference to his own.
    When Ivanhoe reached the habitation of Isaac, he was still in a state of
unconsciousness, owing to the profuse loss of blood which had taken place during
his exertions in the lists. Rebecca examined the wound, and having applied to it
such vulnerary remedies as her art prescribed, informed her father that if fever
could be averted, of which the great bleeding rendered her little apprehensive,
and if the healing balsam of Miriam retained its virtue, there was nothing to
fear for his guest's life, and that he might with safety travel to York with
them on the ensuing day. Isaac looked a little blank at this annunciation. His
charity would willingly have stopped short at Ashby, or at most would have left
the wounded Christian to be tended in the house where he was residing at
present, with an assurance to the Hebrew to whom it belonged, that all expenses
should be duly discharged. To this, however, Rebecca opposed many reasons, of
which we shall only mention two that had peculiar weight with Isaac. The one
was, that she would on no account put the phial of precious balsam into the
hands of another physician even of her own tribe, lest that valuable mystery
should be discovered; the other, that this wounded knight, Wilfred of
