rs and sisters--shafts from a full
quiver--sat around the table variously happy and content with
existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety
pervaded the table.

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

And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless
life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled
with salt tears. _He_ would never sit at the head of his own table,
carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to
each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and
trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their
little hands in his; he would pass through existence like a wraith,
gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping
on--the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered--he,
modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems!
_Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!_ Modern of the moderns? But it was
an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is
the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an
ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new
under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all
is vanity.

"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but
the earth abideth for ever.

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto
the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return
again.

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new
thing under the sun.

"That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which
is wanting cannot be numbered.

"For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow."

Yes, it was all true, all true. How the Jewish genius had gone to the
heart of things, so that the races that hated it found comfort in its
Psalms. No sense of form, the end of Ecclesiastes a confusion and a
weak repetition like the last disordered spasms of a prophetic
seizure. No care for art, only for reality. And yet he had once
thought he loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after
forbidden gods, thrilled by that s