r-locks, and a long, fusty
coat, little regarded even by those amid whom he surged and squeezed
for hours in patience. Aaron counted for less than nothing in a world
he helped to overcrowd, and of which he perceived very little. For,
although he did not fail to make a profit on his gilded goods, and
knew how to wheedle servants at side-doors, he was far behind his
fellows in that misapprehension of the human hurly-burly which makes
your ordinary Russian Jew a political oracle. Aaron's interest in
politics was limited to the wars of the Kings of Israel and the
misdeeds of Titus and Antiochus Epiphanes. To him the modern world was
composed of Jews and heathen; and society had two simple sections--the
rich and the poor.

"Don't you enjoy travelling?" one of the former section once asked him
affably. "Even if it's disagreeable in winter you must pass through a
good deal of beautiful scenery in summer."

"If I am on business," replied the pedlar, "how can I bother about the
beautiful?"

And, flustered though he was by the condescension of the great person,
his naive counter-query expressed a truth. He lived, indeed, in a
strange dream-world, and had no eyes for the real except in the shape
of cheap trinkets. He was happier in the squalid streets of
Strange-ways, where strips of Hebrew patched the windows of
cook-shops, and where a synagogue was ever at hand, than when striding
across the purple moors under an open blue sky, or resting with his
pack by the side of purling brooks. Stupid his enemies would have
called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs
and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by
impersonal malice. To his friends--if the few who were aware of his
existence could be called friends--he was a _Schlemihl_ (a luckless
fool).

"A man who earns a pound a week live without a wife!" complained the
_Shadchan_ (marriage-broker) to a group of sympathetic cap-makers.

"I suppose he's such a _Schlemihl_ no father would ever look at him!"
said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.

"Oh, but he _was_ married in Russia," said another; "but just as he
sent his wife the money to come over, she died."

"And yet you call him a _Schlemihl_!" cried Moshele, the cynic.

"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and
captured the laugh.

It was true. After three years of terrible struggle and privation,
Aaron had prepared an English home for his Ye