gument, his old Judean-Polish mother
jargon came back to him. His old religion he had shed completely, yet
a synagogue-tune could always move him to tears. Sometimes he might be
seen at the theatre, sobbing hysterically at tragedies or laughing
boisterously over comedies, for he had long since learned to love
Homer and the humane arts, though at first he was wont to contend that
no vigor of literary expression could possibly excel his
mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and
eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and
divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole.
But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never
possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady
table--one leg usually supported by a folio volume--surrounded by the
cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself with. And even if
lodged in a nobleman's palace, his surroundings were no cleaner. In
Amsterdam he drove the Dutch to despair: even German housekeepers were
stung to remonstrance. Yet the charm of his conversation, the
brilliancy of his intellect kept him always well-friended. And the
fortune which favors fools watched over his closing years, and sent
the admiring Graf Kalkreuth, an intellectual Silesian nobleman, to dig
him out of miserable lodgings, and instal him in his own castle near
Freistadt.

As he lay upon his luxurious death-bed in the dreary November dusk,
dying at forty-six of a neglected lung-trouble, a worthy Catholic
pastor strove to bring him to a more Christian frame of mind.

"What matters it?" protested the sufferer; "when I am dead, I am
gone."

"Can you say that, dear friend," rejoined the Pastor, with deep
emotion. "How? Your mind, which amid the most unfavorable
circumstances ever soared to higher attainments, which bore such fair
flowers and fruits--shall it be trodden in the dust along with the
poor covering in which it has been clothed? Do you not feel at this
moment that there is something in you which is not body, not matter,
not subject to the conditions of space and time?"

"Ah!" replied Maimon, "there are beautiful dreams and hopes--"

"Which will surely be fulfilled. Should you not wish to come again
into the society of Mendelssohn?"

Maimon was silent.

Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most
foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was
in