ss, without troubling even to arrange their one dress
differently, as a pious Rabbi recommended. They looked used-up and
haggard, all these mothers in Israel. But there were dark-eyed damsels
still gay and fresh, with artistic bodices of violet and green picked
out with gold arabesque.

He turned a corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with
the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway
bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in
the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon
that lit their eyes with sparkles and painted deeper flushes on their
olive cheeks. A bounding little bow-legged girl seemed unconscious of
her deformity; her toes met each other as though in merry dexterity.

Zussmann's eyes were full of tears. "Dance on, dance on," he murmured.
"God shall indeed make the crooked straight."

Fixed to one side of the piano-organ on the level of the handle he saw
a little box, in which lay, as in a cradle, what looked like a monkey,
then like a doll, but on closer inspection turned into a tiny live
child, flaxen-haired, staring with wide gray eyes from under a blue
cap, and sucking at a milk-bottle with preternatural placidity,
regardless of the music throbbing through its resting-place.

"Even so shall humanity live," thought Zussmann, "peaceful as a babe,
cradled in music. God hath sent me a sign."

He returned home, comforted, and told Hulda of the sign.

"Was it an Italian child?" she asked.

"An English child," he answered. "Fair-eyed and fair-haired."

"Then it is a sign that through the English tongue shall the Idea move
the world. Your book will be translated into English--I shall live to
see it."

V

A few afternoons later the Red Beadle, his patched garments
pathetically spruced up, came to see his friends, goaded by the news
of Hulda's illness. There was no ruddiness in his face, the lips of
which were pressed together in defiance of a cruel and credulous
world. That Nature in making herself should have produced creatures
who attributed their creation elsewhere, and who refused to allow her
one acknowledger to make boots, was indeed a proof, albeit vexatious,
of her blind workings.

When he saw what she had done to Hulda and to Zussmann, his lips were
pressed tighter, but as much to keep back a sob as to express extra
resentment.

But on parting he could not help saying to Zussmann, who accompanied
him to t