ments on school territory. I felt honored by this private
initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State,
and I went to my seat with a good deal of dignity, my alarm about the
safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness.

This is not so strictly the story of the second generation that I may
not properly give a brief account of how it fared with my mother when
my father undertook to purge his house of superstition. The process of
her emancipation, it is true, was not obvious to me at the time, but
what I observed of her outward conduct has been interpreted by my
subsequent experience; so that to-day I understand how it happens that
all the year round my mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile
neighbors; but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement,
calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to
the God of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs
must join in the ancient service. It means, I have come to know, that
she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism; but years
were required for this process of instinctive selection.

My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was rather
headlong and strenuous in his methods. To my mother, on the eve of
departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in
America did not spend their days in praying; and he urged her to leave
her wig in Polotzk, as a first step of progress. My mother, like the
majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on
authority; so she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she
took his hint, and set out upon her journey in her own hair. Not that
it was done without reluctance; the Jewish faith in her was deeply
rooted, as in the best of Jews it always is. The law of the Fathers
was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable
from the spirit. But the breath of revolt against orthodox externals
was at this time beginning to reach us in Polotzk from the greater
world, notably from America. Sons whose parents had impoverished
themselves by paying the fine for non-appearance for military duty, in
order to save their darlings from the inevitable sins of violated
Judaism while in the service, sent home portraits of themselves with
their faces shaved; and the grieved old fathers and mothers, after
offering up special prayers for the renegades, and giving charity in
their name, ex