the only thing in
him that astonished the Red Beadle. There was also a gentle deference
of manner not usual with masters, or with pious persons. His
consideration for his employes amounted, in the Beadle's eyes, to
maladministration, and the grave loss he sustained through one of his
hands selling off a crate of finished goods and flying to America was
deservedly due to confidence in another pious person.

II

Despite the Red Beadle's Rationalism, which, basing itself on the
facts of life, was not to be crushed by high-flown German words, the
master-shoemaker showed him marked favor and often invited him to stay
on to supper. Although the Beadle felt this was but the due
recognition of one intellect by another, if an inferior intellect, he
was at times irrationally grateful for the privilege of a place to
spend his evenings in. For the Ghetto had cut him--there could be no
doubt of that. The worshippers in his old synagogue whom he had once
dominated as Beadle now passed him by with sour looks--"a dog one does
not treat thus," the Beadle told himself, tugging miserably at his red
beard.

"It is not as if I were a Meshummad--a convert to Christianity." Some
hereditary instinct admitted _that_ as a just excuse for execration.
"I can't make friends with the Christians, and so I am cut off from
both."

When after a thunderstorm two of the hands resigned their places at
Zussmann's benches on the avowed ground that atheism attracts
lightning, Zussmann's loyalty to the freethinker converted the
Beadle's gratitude from fitfulness into a steady glow.

And, other considerations apart, those were enjoyable suppers after
the toil and grime of the day. The Beadle especially admired
Zussmann's hands when the black grease had been washed off them, the
fingers were so long and tapering. Why had his own fingers been made
so stumpy and square-tipped? Since Nature made herself, why was she so
uneven a worker? Nay, why could she not have given him white teeth
like Zussmann's wife? Not that these were ostentatious--you thought
more of the sweetness of the smile of which they were part. Still, as
Nature's irregularity was particularly manifest in his own teeth, he
could not help the reflection.

If the Red Beadle had not been a widower, the unfeigned success of the
Herz union might have turned his own thoughts to that happy state. As
it was, the sight of their happiness occasionally shot through his
breast renewed pangs of vain lo