h a festival, such a great, holy festival, and then when it
comes...." The pale lips tremble and quiver.

How many days and nights, beginning before Purim, has she sat with her
needle between her fingers, so that the children should have their
holiday frocks--and all depending on her hands and head! How much
thought and care and strength has she spent on preparing the room, their
poor little possessions, and the food? How many were the days, Sabbaths
excepted, on which they went without a spoonful of anything hot, so that
they might be able to give a becoming reception to that dear, great, and
holy visitor, the Passover? Everything (the Almighty forbid that she
should sin with her tongue!) of the best, ready and waiting, and then,
after all....

He, his sheepskin, his fur cap, and his great boots are soaked with rain
and steeped in thick mud, and there, in this condition, lies he, Bertzi
Wasserfuehrer, her husband, her Passover "king," like a great black lump,
on the nice, clean, white, draped "eating-couch," and snores.

IV

The brief tale I am telling you happened in the days before Kamenivke
had joined itself on, by means of the long, tall, and beautiful bridge,
to the great high hill that has stood facing it from everlasting,
thickly wooded, and watered by quantities of clear, crystal streams,
which babble one to another day and night, and whisper with their
running tongues of most important things. So long as the bridge had not
been flung from one of the giant rocks to the other rock, the Kamenivke
people had not been able to procure the good, wholesome water of the
wild hill, and had to content themselves with the thick, impure water of
the river Smotritch, which has flowed forever round the eminence on
which Kamenivke is built. But man, and especially the Jew, gets used to
anything, and the Kamenivke people, who are nearly all Grandfather
Abraham's grandchildren, had drunk Smotritch water all their lives, and
were conscious of no grievance.

But the lot of the Kamenivke water-carriers was hard and bitter.
Kamenivke stands high, almost in the air, and the river Smotritch runs
deep down in the valley.

In summer, when the ground is dry, it was bearable, for then the
Kamenivke water-carrier was merely bathed in sweat as he toiled up the
hill, and the Jewish breadwinner has been used to that for ages. But in
winter, when the snow was deep and the frost tremendous, when the steep
Skossny hill with its clay so