and scourged backs
and sexless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight,
and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful."

"Every man makes his God in his own image," I thought, too touched to
jar him by saying it aloud.

"And so--ever since--off and on--I have worked at this human picture
of him--The Joyous Comrade--to restore the true Christ to the world."

"Which you hope to convert?"

"My business is with work, not with results. 'Whatsoever thy hand
findeth to do, do with all thy might.' What can any single hand, even
the mightiest, do in this great weltering world? Yet, without the hope
and the dream, who would work at all? And so, not without hope, yet
with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can
now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for
my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish
lust for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet
human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the
essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question:
What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own
soul?"

His voice died away solemnly, and I heard only the click of the
billiard-balls and the rumble and roar of New York.

CHAD GADYA

"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come,
saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength
of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of
bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of
Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I
redeem."--EXODUS xiii. 14, 15.

_Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat._

At last the Passover family service was drawing to an end. His father
had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up:

_One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in
a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice,
talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out
the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed
pillows.

_And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two
zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service
was over. He had only come in