orror, followed his sacrilegious hand. They
awaited the thud of his body. Maimon walked on, smiling.

What had he proved to them? Only that he was a hateful heretic, a
profaner of sanctuaries.

The wounded fanaticism that now shadowed him with its hatred provoked
him to answering excesses. The remnant of religion that clung, despite
himself, to his soul, irritated him. Would not further culture rid him
of the incubus? His dream of Berlin revived. True, bigotry barked
there too, but culture went on its serene course. The fame and
influence of Mendelssohn had grown steadily, and it was now at its
apogee, for Lessing had written _Nathan Der Weise_, and in the
tempest that followed its production, and despite the ban placed on
the play and its author in both Catholic and Protestant countries, the
most fanatical Christian foes of the bold freelance could not cry that
the character was impossible.

For there--in the very metropolis--lived the Sage himself, the David
to the dramatist's Jonathan, the member of the Coffee-House of the
Learned, the friend of Prince Lippe-Schaumberg, the King's own
Protected Jew, in every line of whose countenance Lavater kept
insisting the unprejudiced phrenologist might read the soul of
Socrates.

And he, Maimon, no less blessed with genius, what had he been doing,
to slumber so long on these soft beds of superstition and barbarism,
deaf to that early call of Truth, that youthful dream of Knowledge?
Yes, he would go back to Berlin, he would shake off the clinging mists
of the Ghetto, he would be the pioneer of his people's emancipation.
His employers had remained throughout staunch admirers of his
intellect. But despite every protest he bade them farewell, and
purchasing a seat on the Frankfort post with his scanty savings set
out for Berlin. No mendicity committees lay in wait for the prosperous
passenger, and as the coach passed through the Rosenthaler gate, the
brave sound of the horn seemed to Maimon at once a flourish of triumph
over Berlin and of defiance to superstition and ignorance.

III

But superstition and ignorance were not yet unhorsed. The Jewish
police-officers, though they allowed coach-gentry to enter and take up
their quarters where they pleased, did not fail to pry into their
affairs the next day, as well for the protection of the Jewish
community against equivocal intruders as in accordance with its
responsibility to the State.

In his modest lodging on the New-M