ks; how he used to steal into the unoccupied, unfurnished
manor-house and copy the figures on the tapestries, standing in
midwinter, half-frozen, the paper in one hand, the pencil in the
other; and how, when these artistic enthusiasms were sternly if
admiringly checked by a father intent on siring a Rabbi, he relieved
the dreary dialectics of the Talmud--so tedious to a child
uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible
in a red cow--by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store
of Hebrew scientific and historical works discovered in an old
cupboard in his father's study. To this chamber, which had also served
as the bedroom in which the child slept with his grandmother, the
young man's thoughts returned with wistful bitterness, and at the
image of the innocent little figure poring over the musty volumes by
the flickering firelight in the silence of the night, the mass of rags
heaved yet more convulsively. How he had enjoyed putting on fresh wood
after his grandmother had gone to bed, and grappling with the
astronomical treatise, ignoring the grumblings of the poor old lady
who lay a-cold for want of him. Ah, the lonely little boy was, indeed,
in Heaven, treading the celestial circles--and by stealth, which made
it all the sweeter. But that armillary sphere he had so ably made for
himself out of twisted rods had undone him: his grandmother, terrified
by the child's interest in these mystic convolutions, had betrayed
the magical instrument to his father. Other episodes of the long
pursuit of Knowledge--not to be impeded even by flogging pedagogues,
diverted but slightly by marriage at the age of eleven,--crossed his
mind. What ineffable rapture the first reading of Maimonides had
excited, _The Guide of the Perplexed_ supplying the truly perplexed
youth with reasons for the Jewish fervor which informed him. How he
had reverenced the great mediaeval thinker, regarding him as the ideal
of men, the most inspired of teachers. Had he not changed his own name
to Maimon to pattern himself after his Master, was not even now his
oath under temptation: "I swear by the reverence which I owe my great
teacher, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, not to do this act?"

But even Maimonides had not been able to allay his thirst. Maimonides
was an Aristotelian, and the youth would fain drink at the
fountain-head. He tramped a hundred and fifty miles to see an old
Hebrew book on the Peripatetic philosophy. But Hebrew w