ox, which had drunk the
water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the staff,
which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had
devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya!_

Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! He had never thought of the meaning of the
words, always connected them with the finish of the ceremony. "All
over! All over!" they seemed to wail, and in the quaint music there
seemed a sense of infinite disillusion, of infinite rest; a
winding-up, a conclusion, things over and done with, a fever subsided,
a toil completed, a clamor abated, a farewell knell, a little folding
of the hands to sleep.

Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! It was a wail over the struggle for existence,
the purposeless procession of the ages, the passing of the ancient
empires--as the commentators had pointed out--and of the modern
empires that would pass on to join them, till the earth itself--as the
scientists had pointed out--passed away in cold and darkness. Flux and
reflux, the fire and the water, the water and the fire! He thought of
the imperturbable skeletons that still awaited exhumation in Pompeii,
the swaddled mummies of the Pharaohs, the undiminished ashes of
forgotten lovers in old Etruscan tombs. He had a flashing sense of the
great pageant of the Mediaeval--popes, kings, crusaders, friars,
beggars, peasants, flagellants, schoolmen; of the vast modern life in
Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago; the brilliant
life of the fashionable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor
in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the
prostitutes, the slaveys in lodging-houses, the criminals, the
lunatics; the vast hordes of Russia, the life pullulating in the
swarming boats on Chinese rivers, the merry butterfly life of Japan,
the unknown savages of mid-Africa with their fetishes and war-dances,
the tribes of the East sleeping in tents or turning uneasily on the
hot terraces of their houses, the negro races growing into such a
terrible problem in the United States, and each of all these peoples,
nay, each unit of any people, thinking itself the centre of the
universe, and of its love and care; the destiny of the races no
clearer than the destiny of the individuals and no diviner than the
life of insects, and all the vast sweep of history nothing but a spasm
in the life of one of the meanest of an obscure group of worlds, in an
infinity of vaster constel