He, Johel, did it all; I stood on
watch in the fields--when I saw the fire--Ai! ai! I understood what I
had been doing--"

"Hush!" said a low, sorrowful voice close to the despairing, almost
senseless, man. "Hold your tongue, Shmul, till I shut the door and
window."

Shmul raised his face, but again dropped it on the dusty floor.

"Morejne," he moaned, "morejne, my daughters were growing up; it was
necessary to marry them; I had no money to pay the taxes with for the
whole year!"

"Get up and calm yourself," said Meir.

Shmul did not listen. With his lips sweeping the dusty boards, he
kept on moaning.

"Morejne! save me. I am lost, body and soul."

"You have not lost your soul, Shmul. The Eternal will weigh your
poverty against your sin; that is if you do not take the money with
which bad people tempted you."

This time Shmul lifted his face from the floor. The lean and
ashy-pale face, covered with dust and twitching with nervous terror,
presented a picture of the deepest human misery.

He looked at Meir with despairing eyes, and pointing at the miserable
room, he groaned:

"Morejne! how shall we be able to live without that money?"

Fully half-an-hour passed before Meir left the cottage, where the
outcast Shmul accused himself, wailed and moaned in a voice that
gradually became lower till it almost sank to a whisper. The ruddy
glow from the street fell upon one corner of the dark entrance.
There, coiled up between the goats, his head resting upon a
projecting board, with the red light of the fire upon his face, slept
Lejbele. Neither noise nor the glare of the fire, not even the
lamentations of his unhappy father, had disturbed his innocent sleep
among his friends, the goats.

Next morning an unusual stir prevailed amongst the inhabitants of the
town. The common topic of all their conversation was the
conflagration at the Kamionka estate. The whole house was reduced to
ashes; nearly all the outbuildings had been burned down; the barns
and ricks with all the year's harvest had been devoured by the
flames.

The old lady, the mother of the lord of Kamionka, was very ill, and
had been carried into a neighbour's house.

To discuss these and other items of news, people stood in groups
about the streets or before their houses; all the ordinary business
of their every-day life seemed suspended for the time being.

Now and then among the groups a single question was heard repeatedly:

"What will become o