whom he bought birds merely to set them free, and
the blood-red hair of the hangman's niece who sang him folk-songs. And
suddenly he came to himself, raised his eyelid with his forefinger and
looked at her.

"Catholic!" he cried angrily. "I never returned to Judaism, because I
never left it. My baptism was a mere wetting. I have never put
Heinrich--only H--on my books, and never have I ceased to write
'Harry' to my mother. Though the Jews hate me even more than the
Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren."

"I know, I know," she said soothingly. "I am sorry I hurt you. I
remember well the passage in which you say that your becoming a
Christian was the fault of the Saxons who changed sides suddenly at
Leipzig; or else of Napoleon who had no need to go to Russia; or else
of his school-master who gave him instruction at Brienne in geography,
and did not tell him that it was very cold at Moscow in winter."

"Very well, then," he said, pacified. "Let them not say either that I
have been converted to Judaism on my death-bed. Was not my first poem
based on one in the Passover night _Hagadah_? Was not my first
tragedy, _Almansor_, really the tragedy of down-trodden Israel, that
great race which from the ruins of its second Temple knew to save, not
the gold and the precious stones, but its real treasure, the Bible--a
gift to the world that would make the tourist traverse oceans to see a
Jew, if there were only one left alive. The only people that preserved
freedom of thought through the middle ages, they have now to preserve
God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss
guards of Deism. God was always the beginning and end of my thought.
When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your
Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world. Is
not my best work, _The Rabbi of Bacharach_, devoted to expressing the
'vast Jewish sorrow,' as Boerne calls it?"

"But you never finished it?"

"I was a fool to be persuaded by Moser. Or was it Gans? Ah, will not
Jehovah count it to me for righteousness, that New Jerusalem
Brotherhood with them in the days when I dreamt of reconciling Jew and
Greek--the goodness of beauty with the beauty of goodness! Oh, those
days of youthful dreams, whose winters are warmer than the summers of
the after years. How they tried to crush us, the Rabbis and the State
alike! O the brave Moser, the lofty-souled, the pure-hearted, who
pass