her." And, bursting into tears, he repeated the verse of Job: "If I
did despise the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant, when they
contended with me, what shall I do when God riseth up?"

These and many such things, both of learned men and of simple, I hope
yet to chronicle for the youths of Israel. But above all let the
memory of the Master himself be to them a melody and a blessing: he
whose life taught me to understand that the greatest man is not he who
dwells in the purple, amid palaces and courtiers, hedged and guarded,
and magnified by illusive pomp, but he who, talking cheerfully with
his fellows in the market-place, humble as though he were
unworshipped, and poor as though he were unregarded, is divinely
enkindled, so that a light shines from him whereby men recognize the
visible presence of God.

MAIMON THE FOOL AND NATHAN THE WISE

I

Happy burghers of Berlin in their Sunday best trooped through the
Rosenthaler gate in the cool of the August evening for their customary
stroll in the environs: few escaped noticing the recumbent ragged
figure of a young man, with a long dirty beard, wailing and writhing
uncouthly just outside the gate: fewer inquired what ailed him.

He answered in a strange mixture of jargons, blurring his meaning
hopelessly with scraps of Hebrew, of Jewish-German, of Polish, of
Russian and mis-punctuating it with choking sobs and gasps. One good
soul after another turned away helpless. The stout roll of Hebrew
manuscript the swarthy, unkempt creature clutched in his hand grew
grimier with tears. The soldiers on guard surveyed him with
professional callousness.

Only the heart of the writhing wretch knew its own bitterness, only
those tear-blinded eyes saw the pitiful panorama of a penurious Jew's
struggle for Culture. For, nursed in a narrow creed, he had dreamt the
dream of Knowledge. To know--to know--was the passion that consumed
him: to understand the meaning of life and the causes of things.

He saw himself a child again in Poland, in days of comparative
affluence, clad in his little damask suit, shocking his father with a
question at the very first verse of the Bible, which they began to
read together when he was six years old, and which held many a box on
the ear in store for his ingenuous intellect. He remembered his early
efforts to imitate with chalk or charcoal the woodcuts of birds or
foliage happily discovered on the title-pages of dry-as-dust Hebrew
boo