," said the sub-editor. "But we had to have at least
one advertisement of that kind; just to show we should be pleased to
advertise our readers' deaths. I looked in the daily papers to see if
there were any births or marriages with Jewish names, but I couldn't
find any, and that was the only Jewish-sounding death I could see."

"But the Rev. Abraham Barnett was a _Meshumad_," shrieked Sugarman the
_Shadchan_. Raphael turned pale. To have inserted an advertisement about
an apostate missionary was indeed terrible. But little Sampson's
audacity did not desert him.

"I thought the orthodox party would be pleased to hear of the death of a
_Meshumad_," he said suavely, screwing his eyeglass more tightly into
its orbit, "on the same principle that anti-Semites take in the Jewish
papers to hear of the death of Jews."

For a moment De Haan was staggered. "That would be all very well," he
said; "let him be an atonement for us all, but then you've gone and put
'May his soul he bound up in the bundle of life.'"

It was true. The stock Hebrew equivalent for R.I.P. glared from the
page.

"Fortunately, that taking advertisement of _kosher_ trousers comes just
underneath," said De Haan, "and that may draw off the attention. On page
2 you actually say in a note that Rabbenu Bachja's great poem on
repentance should be incorporated in the ritual and might advantageously
replace the obscure _Piyut_ by Kalir. But this is rank Reform--it's
worse than the papers we come to supersede."

"But surely you know it is only the Printing Press that has stereotyped
our liturgy, that for Maimonides and Ibn Ezra, for David Kimchi and
Joseph Albo, the contents were fluid, that--"

"We don't deny that," interrupted Schlesinger drily. "But we can't have
any more alterations now-a-days. Who is there worthy to alter them?
You?"

"Certainly not. I merely suggest."

"You are playing into the hands of our enemies," said De Haan, shaking
his head. "We must not let our readers even imagine that the prayer-book
can be tampered with. It's the thin end of the wedge. To trim our
liturgy is like trimming living flesh; wherever you cut, the blood
oozes. The four cubits of the _Halacha_--that is what is wanted, not
changes in the liturgy. Once touch anything, and where are you to stop?
Our religion becomes a flux. Our old Judaism is like an old family
mansion, where each generation has left a memorial and where every room
is hallowed with traditions of merrym