ier, synagogue beadle, picture-frame manufacturer, cantor, peddler,
shoemaker in all branches, coat-seller, official executioner of fowls
and cattle, Hebrew teacher, fruiterer, circumciser, professional
corpse-watcher, and now he was a tailor out of work.

Unquestionably Malka was right in considering Moses a _Schlemihl_ in
comparison with many a fellow-immigrant, who brought indefatigable hand
and subtle brain to the struggle for existence, and discarded the prop
of charity as soon as he could, and sometimes earlier.

It was as a hawker that he believed himself most gifted, and he never
lost the conviction that if he could only get a fair start, he had in
him the makings of a millionaire. Yet there was scarcely anything cheap
with which he had not tramped the country, so that when poor Benjamin,
who profited by his mother's death to get into the Orphan Asylum, was
asked to write a piece of composition on "The Methods of Travelling," he
excited the hilarity of the class-room by writing that there were
numerous ways of travelling, for you could travel with sponge, lemons,
rhubarb, old clothes, jewelry, and so on, for a page of a copy book.
Benjamin was a brilliant boy, yet he never shook off some of the
misleading associations engendered by the parental jargon. For Mrs.
Ansell had diversified her corrupt German by streaks of incorrect
English, being of a much more energetic and ambitious temperament than
the conservative Moses, who dropped nearly all his burden of English
into her grave. For Benjamin, "to travel" meant to wander about selling
goods, and when in his books he read of African travellers, he took it
for granted that they were but exploiting the Dark Continent for small
profits and quick returns.

And who knows? Perhaps of the two species, it was the old Jewish
peddlers who suffered the more and made the less profit on the average.
For the despised three-hatted scarecrow of Christian caricature, who
shambled along snuffling "Old clo'," had a strenuous inner life, which
might possibly have vied in intensity, elevation, and even sense of
humor, with that of the best of the jeerers on the highway. To Moses,
"travelling" meant straying forlornly in strange towns and villages,
given over to the worship of an alien deity and ever ready to avenge his
crucifixion; in a land of whose tongue he knew scarce more than the
Saracen damsel married by legend to a Becket's father. It meant praying
brazenly in crowded railwa