h was seriously impairing his health and spirits; and being told
that it was to please God, who required this sacrifice at his hands,
she, in a serious and most emphatic tone, replied, "If God is pleased
in making you sick and unhappy, I hate God." This idea of the cruelty
of God toward her father had a remarkable influence upon her; and at
the age of fourteen she renounced her belief in the Bible and the
religion of her father, which brought down upon her great trouble and
persecution alike from her own Jewish friends and from Christians.

At the age of sixteen she had the misfortune to lose her mother. A
year afterward her father married again, and through misdirected
kindness involved her in a lawsuit, in which she plead her own case
and won it; but she left the property with her father, declaring that
she cared nothing for it, but only for justice, and that her
inheritance might not fall into mercenary hands. She subsequently
traveled in Poland, Russia, the Germanic States, Holland, Belgium,
France, and England; during which time she witnessed and took part in
some interesting and important affairs. While in Berlin she had an
interview with the King of Prussia concerning the right of Polish Jews
to remain in that city. The Jews of Russian Poland were not permitted
to continue in Prussia, unless they could bring forward as security
Prussian citizens who were holders of real estate. But even then they
could get a permit to tarry only on a visit, and not to transact any
business for themselves. Mlle. Potoski, being from Poland and a
Jewess, was subject to this disability. Though she could have obtained
the requisite security by applying for it, she preferred to stand upon
her natural rights as a human being. She remonstrated against the
gross injustice of the law, and obtained the right to remain as long
as she wished, and to do what she pleased.

In Hague, she became acquainted with a very distressing case of a poor
sailor, the father of four children, whose wife had been imprisoned
for an alleged crime of which he insisted she was innocent. Inquiring
into the case, Mlle. Potoski drew up a petition which she personally
presented to the King of Holland, and had the satisfaction of seeing
the poor woman restored to her family. She was in Paris during the
Revolution of July, 1830, and witnessed most of its exciting scenes.
On seeing Louis Phillipe presented by Lafayette to the people of Paris
from the balcony of the Tui