nta, but she slept
instead in a Russian grave. Perhaps if his friends had known how he
had thrown away the chance of sending for her earlier, they would have
been still more convinced that he was a born _Schlemihl_. For within
eighteen months of his landing in London docks, Aaron, through his
rapid mastery of English and ciphering at the evening classes for
Hebrew adults, had found a post as book-keeper to a clothes-store in
Ratcliff Highway. But he soon discovered that he was expected to fake
the invoices, especially when drunken sailors came to rig themselves
up in mufti.

"Well, we'll throw the scarf in," the genial salesman would concede
cheerily. "And the waistcoat? One-and-three--a good waistcoat, as
clean as new, and dirt cheap, so 'elp me."

But when Aaron made out the bill he was nudged to put the
one-and-three in the column for pounds and shillings respectively, and
even, if the buyer were sufficiently in funds and liquor, to set down
the date of the month in the same pecuniary partitions, and to add it
up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron,
although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of
goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took
him a year of nondescript occupations to amass a little stock of mock
jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more
profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy
learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of
the former or more of the latter than our itinerant idealist.

Such was one of the thousands of souls swarming that afternoon in the
synagogue, such was one despised unit of a congregation itself
accounted by the world a pitiable mass of superstitious poverty, and
now tossing with emotion in the dim spaces of the sacred building.

The Oriental imagination of the hearers magnified the simple soldierly
sentences of the orator, touched them with color and haloed them with
mystery, till, as the deep gasps and sobs of the audience struck back
like blows on the speaker's chest, the contagion of their passion
thrilled him to responsive emotion. And, seen through tears, arose for
him and them a picture of Israel again enthroned in Palestine, the
land flowing once more with milk and honey, rustling with corn and
vines planted by their own hands, and Zion--at peace with all the
world--the recognized arbitrator of the nations, making true the word
of the