ng officer is not satisfied, he will send you to fetch
water."

I know it isn't true, first, because the commanding officer mustn't know
that I write in the orderly-room, a Jew can't be an army secretary;
secondly, because he is certain to be satisfied: he once gave me a note
to write himself, and was very pleased with it.

"If you were not a Jew," he said to me then, "I should make a corporal
of you."

Still, my corporal always repeats his threat about the water, so that I
may preserve a proper respect for him, although I not only respect him,
I tremble before his size. When _he_ comes back tipsy from town, and
finds me in the orderly-room, he commands me to drag his muddy boots off
his feet, and I obey him and drag off his boots.

Sometimes I don't care, and other times it hurts my feelings.

ISAIAH BERSCHADSKI

Pen name of Isaiah Domaschewitski; born, 1871, near Derechin, Government
of Grodno (Lithuania), White Russia; died, 1909, in Warsaw; education,
Jewish and secular; teacher of Hebrew in Ekaterinoslav, Southern Russia;
in business, in Ekaterinoslav and Baku; editor, in 1903, of Ha-Zeman,
first in St. Petersburg, then in Wilna; after a short sojourn in Riga
removed to Warsaw; writer of novels and short stories, almost
exclusively in Hebrew; contributor to Ha-Meliz, Ha-Shiloah, and other
periodicals; pen names besides Berschadski: Berschadi, and Shimoni;
collected works in Hebrew, Tefusim u-Zelalim, Warsaw, 1899, and Ketabim
Aharonim, Warsaw, 1909.

FORLORN AND FORSAKEN

Forlorn and forsaken she was in her last years. Even when she lay on the
bed of sickness where she died, not one of her relations or friends came
to look after her; they did not even come to mourn for her or accompany
her to the grave. There was not even one of her kin to say the first
Kaddish over her resting-place. My wife and I were the only friends she
had at the close of her life, no one but us cared for her while she was
ill, or walked behind her coffin. The only tears shed at the lonely old
woman's grave were ours. I spoke the only Kaddish for her soul, but we,
after all, were complete strangers to her!

Yes, we were strangers to her, and she was a stranger to us! We made her
acquaintance only a few years before her death, when she was living in
two tiny rooms opposite the first house we settled in after our
marriage. Nobody ever came to see her, and she herself visited nowhere,
except at the little store where sh