udy of the Torah.

At dawn, when the people begin to come in for the Morning Prayer, they
walk round them on tiptoe, giving them their four-ells' distance, and
avoid meeting their look, which is apt to be sharp and burning.

"That is the way we study in Lithuania!"

The stout, hairy householder, good-natured and credulous, listens
attentively to the wonderful tales, loosens the sash over his pelisse in
leisurely fashion, unbuttons his waistcoat across his generous waist,
blows out his cheeks, and sways his head from side to side, because--one
may believe anything of the Lithuanians!

Then, if once in a long, long while the rich Volhynian householder
stumbled, by some miracle or other, into Lithuania, sheer curiosity
would drive him to take a look at the Lithuanian celebrity. But he would
stand before him in trembling and astonishment, as one stands before a
high granite rock, the summit of which can barely be discerned. Is he
terrified by the dark and bushy brows, the keen, penetrating looks, the
deep, stern wrinkles in the forehead that might have been carved in
stone, they are so stiffly fixed? Who can say? Or is he put out of
countenance by the cold, hard assertiveness of their speech, which bores
into the conscience like a gimlet, and knows of no mercy?--for from
between those wrinkles, from beneath those dark brows, shines out the
everlasting glory of the Shechinah.

Such were the celebrated Rabbonim of Mouravanke.

They were an old family, a long chain of great men, generation on
generation of tall, well-built, large-boned Jews, all far on in years,
with thick, curly beards. It was very seldom one of these beards showed
a silver hair. They were stern, silent men, who heard and saw
everything, but who expressed themselves mostly by means of their
wrinkles and their eyebrows rather than in words, so that when a
Mouravanke Rav went so far as to say "N-nu," that was enough.

The dignity of Rav was hereditary among them, descending from father to
son, and, together with the Rabbinical position and the eighteen gulden
a week salary, the son inherited from his father a tall, old
reading-desk, smoked and scorched by the candles, in the old
house-of-study in the corner by the ark, and a thick, heavy-knotted
stick, and an old holiday pelisse of lustrine, the which, if worn on a
bright Sabbath-day in summer-time, shines in the sun, and fairly shouts
to be looked at.

They arrived in Mouravanke generations ago, when