rom his face: his thick lips, and his way of twitching up the right
corner of his mouth and his right eyebrow, when he was talking, and
that peculiar oily brilliance of his eyes which is only found in
Jews. I understood, too, his phraseology. . . . From further
conversation I learned that his name was Alexandr Ivanitch, and had
in the past been Isaac, that he was a native of the Mogilev province,
and that he had come to the Holy Mountains from Novotcherkassk,
where he had adopted the orthodox faith.

Having finished his sausage, Alexandr Ivanitch got up, and, raising
his right eyebrow, said his prayer before the ikon. The eyebrow
remained up when he sat down again on the little sofa and began
giving me a brief account of his long biography.

"From early childhood I cherished a love for learning," he began
in a tone which suggested he was not speaking of himself, but of
some great man of the past. "My parents were poor Hebrews; they
exist by buying and selling in a small way; they live like beggars,
you know, in filth. In fact, all the people there are poor and
superstitious; they don't like education, because education, very
naturally, turns a man away from religion. . . . They are fearful
fanatics. . . . Nothing would induce my parents to let me be educated,
and they wanted me to take to trade, too, and to know nothing but
the Talmud. . . . But you will agree, it is not everyone who can
spend his whole life struggling for a crust of bread, wallowing in
filth, and mumbling the Talmud. At times officers and country
gentlemen would put up at papa's inn, and they used to talk a great
deal of things which in those days I had never dreamed of; and, of
course, it was alluring and moved me to envy. I used to cry and
entreat them to send me to school, but they taught me to read Hebrew
and nothing more. Once I found a Russian newspaper, and took it
home with me to make a kite of it. I was beaten for it, though I
couldn't read Russian. Of course, fanaticism is inevitable, for
every people instinctively strives to preserve its nationality, but
I did not know that then and was very indignant. . . ."

Having made such an intellectual observation, Isaac, as he had been,
raised his right eyebrow higher than ever in his satisfaction and
looked at me, as it were, sideways, like a cock at a grain of corn,
with an air as though he would say: "Now at last you see for certain
that I am an intellectual man, don't you?" After saying someth