"Well, we 'll see."

66

They are the cast-off clothes of his young protector," argued Noah.

"Possibly," said Salome, thoughtfully.

struggles and sorrows of educated men—even such a heart is chilled by the trammels of that society My only fear," said Salome, "is, that he which fritters away so many noble impulses. The may be of better extraction than we are aware of. opportunities that offered in Noah's humble career His clothes are certainly not those of the class to of promoting the views of others, and of aiding which he is said to belong. If his name be Pathem through their difficulties, were seldom neg-vel Jakubska, as they say, why does his linen bear lected by him; and now, when he drove to a dis- L. S., and a coronet?" tant town for a physician, and, later, sent for medicines-sparing neither his horses, his few helps, nor himself-and when Salome stole stray moments by day, and whole hours by night, from her manifold occupations, or from her well-earned repose, to look after the little patient, surely their benevolence far exceeded that which the richest boons can confer; more especially when the illness turned out to be typhus, in its worst character. Yet, for all this, we will not say that Pavel was here tended as he would have been in a parent's home; but it was much, considering what a total stranger he was to those among whom he had so unexpectedly fallen, and who were far from bestowing upon each other the tender solicitude of refined affection. Theirs was a hard, coarse life, which it required a strong, coarse mind and frame to endure.

Pavel's cousin was duly made acquainted with the state of affairs; but he avoided to communicate it to the mother, whose presence could only cool the interest taken in her son by his new friends, and who, by her habit of intoxication, would augment the confusion which Pavel's illness had already created in their family. He, of course, engaged that she should pay the physician and apothecary, but could not specify the when. As to remuneration for trouble and derangement, he would not hear of it, but engaged to defray funeral expenses, in case they should become necessary. Noah, not having been prepared for fair dealing in this matter, allowed the man's conduct in no way to influence his bearing towards the poor boy; though he vented a few exclamations of anger behind the peasant's back, being too cautious to utter any malediction in the face of a Christian.

It was neither the physician's unfrequent visits, nor the apothecary's drugs, nor the motherly tender care of Salome, that preserved the child's life when it appeared well nigh extinct. The native strength he had inherited from his parents, fostered in early childhood by his gentle nurture, turned away the dart of death. There were none by him now to feel exulting joy at those simple words, "He is saved!" Had he died, scarcely would Jakubska, the only being on earth who cared for him, have felt his loss-so little was she accustomed to his presence; nor was it a happy star that recalled to life one for whom the cup had been poisoned at the very outset. Few words passed between Noah and his wife on this occasion.

"Besides," added Noah, by way of a conclusive argument, "if he were of any possible importance, his good cousin, as he calls himself would have shown more anxiety on his behalf." It was more astonishing that Pavel should survive the first moments of returning reason, in his then weak state, than that he should have overcome the fever, virulent as it had been. That naked, fireless chamber-the squalid poverty-the filth that surrounded him-the unaccustomed faces-the sense of neglect and solitude-the want of a breast on which to lay his feeble head-compared with the recent past, when his childish indispositions had been treated as serious misfortunes, and Seraphinka and his French bonne vied with each other in devising the story he should like best; and the count sat hours by his bedside telling him of bear and wolf-hunting, of far distant cities and people he had visited, and, above all, of the great Napoleon-the general's idol. Such a contrast might well have proved overwhelming. But illness had tamed the energy of despair, and permitted moral impressions to steal upon him by degrees. Like sound to a weakened sense of hearing, discords jarred less acutely in his enfeebled system. Indeed, he had at first but intervals of consciousness; so that the long, black silk robe and fur cap of the Jew, and the high head-gear of his wife, did not even remind him of the abhorred race, which the general would stoop to revile, and the gentle countess could find no words to defend-whom Seraphinka abominated more than ghosts, and beggars-and with whom the meanest Christian serf on the estate would not have changed condition. The boy dreamed not of this last indignity which fate had imposed upon him, or rather of the misfortune of having imbibed prejudices the most unjust and unwarrantable, to see them turned like a double-edged sword against himself. It was relief, however, not to perceive the dreaded Jakubska at his waking anew to life; and as no one around him seemed to be aware of her existence, he began to hope that she was but part of some horrible nightmare. It was but slowly, very slowly, that he could, by dint of what he extracted from the people of the house, and by stringing his own confused recollections, catch the connecting thread which bound the present with the past. Often, very often, did it break again in his weakened mind. Only one thing he

"When he is well I have a great mind to take would, on no account, admit to himself; namely, him back whence he came."

that Jakubska could, by any possibility the most remote, be his mother. If she had, in truth, wrongfully palmed him on the count, still he must

belong of this he felt certain-to an equally com- | of their own past errors! How much oftener is mendable stock. The utmost efforts of his young the man crushed in the boy than the unthinking— imagination were powerless to grapple with his that numerous class which glides through the world history in its real form. His thoughts at last without knowing or inquiring what passes beyond concentrated themselves on the one single notion their own little circle—who turn life's pages, as that an enormous injustice had been perpetrated they do those of a book, without diving beneath on him, and that the count was the perpetrator. the surface-ever become aware of. Why he should have repulsed him, he inquired not; that he had done so the moment the eyes of his real or supposed mother were closed, was a fact that entered his soul like a poisoned arrow, to corrode every good sentiment, every kind feeling that might have sprung up there. He had full time, during his long convalescence-retarded as it was by the want of comfort, the disgust he felt for the only kind of food the house afforded, the painful emotions that agitated him--to ponder upon his situation.

At first Pavel watched, with silent, sulky attention, the, to him, strange proceedings of those who surrounded him. On his side, Noah said to Salome-" The greatest service we can render this poor boy is to let his present mood quietly wear itself out. Accustomed as he is to another mode of existence, ours will, of course, appear very hard at first; let us not soften it to him by a single effort. The children in Russia, once past the ordeal of cold water at their birth, are strong and hearty for the rest of their lives; our rude habits will be to him that strengthening bath. Wait awhile; let 's not press him; he 'll come round of himself. Keep the children from him with their teasing questions. Be careful not to irritate the fresh wound; it will heal all the sooner."

Health came at last, but not the desire of life along with it. He felt that he had died the day when the splendid hearse carried his only friend to the family vault. He could not have arranged this in words he did not, perhaps, think it in set phrase-but the feeling was rooted in his inmost heart. On that bed of sickness, in the first an- Greatly was Pavel indebted to this interdiction. guish of reawakening consciousness, he took a When weary of the solitude and cold of his dark strange resolve which tinged, to a great degree, and fireless closet, he would steal into the common his after existence he determined-namely, to room, and sometimes remain for hours in the darkentrust to no human being, and least of all to his est corner, eying, with the stealthy, sleepy viginew associates, now he had recognized their real lance of a cat, the movements of all around. But character, any portion of his past life. To this when a chance visitor, at this season very rareresolution, the result of the indomitable pride a peasant, a packman, or travelling Jew-entered which was the ground-work of the boy's temper the room, he slunk off, unnoticed, back to his little and had been fostered by his education, he after-Siberia, as he had christened his comfortless den. wards adhered with a steadfastness most uncom- His fine clothes being no longer available—for in mon in one so young; thus precluding the benefit the few weeks he had spent under the Jew's roof of much sage advice on Noah's part, which might he had completely outgrown them-were replaced have softened the asperity of his fate. Smarting by the coarse, ill-shaped habiliments generally as he was under a sense of cruelty, like older worn by the boors of those countries. It was martyrs, he contemplated, with a sort of luxury with a smile of ineffable bitterness that he thrust of woe and resentment, every additional hardship himself into these garments, repeating, mechanresulting from his present situation. He luxuri-ically, as he did so, "The evil eye, the evil eye." ated in every fresh grievance, and from the depth But behind this feeling there lurked a hope, dim of his humiliation drew his strength. He steeped his young soul in bitterness to steel it, when he might have found a shield in lofty resignation.

He rose from his bed with a contracted brow and sullen air, the cold eye and stern mouth of riper years, and that strange, unnatural expression which passion too early developed, or experience too early bought, so often give a child. What is vulgarly called an old look had settled upon his face, and forever banished thence the sweetness peculiar to it a few weeks back. But worse yet, the heart had lost its better, gentler impulses. The harsh manner in which, without a word of preparation, the count had launched that young soul upon so new a course, was one of those moral crimes which are daily committed, in one shape or another, without the perpetrators ever descending into their own hearts to tax themselves with their iniquity. How many men have been thus cast friendless upon the world, not the children of others, but the still more direct victims

and distant, indeed, that at the end of a long vista of years of trial the enchantment would cease, and he be restored to himself and to happiness-he would be once more the heir of Stanoiki.

During the few first months that elapsed after the terrible change in his fortunes, he lived on that one feeble ray of light, and felt towards Noah and Salome much the same kind of creeping horror which he had experienced towards Jakubska. For if he could easily fancy the latter turning into a wolf on that lone common where he had been left with her, and picture to himself the terror of her claws and fangs, the superstitious boy remembered the tales his nurse and Seraphinka had recounted to him about the mysterious and abominable rites of the Jews, the crucifying of Christian children on Good Friday not being forgotten. And the habits of the Jews, for a time, occupied his imagination much after the manner in which the movements of the Ogre into his whose hands he had fallen, might be supposed to have occupied

Had

that of Tom Thumb. Their averseness from how should it fail to reconcile, in time, a child of touching anything used by a Christian, owing to tender years, if not with his destiny, at least with which, poor as they were, they kept a complete his circumstances? He could not but perceive service apart for themselves—the ten command- and render justice to the frugality and the sobriety ments engraved on steel tablets nailed within each of the Jews; the more marked that the usual fredoor, but in such a way as to escape the careless quenters of the pot-house were not the most absteeye, which seemed to him, ignorant as he was of mious of mankind. The touching family love, the Hebrew characters, little else but the mystic natural in a race so restricted within narrow social signs of some horrible malefice-their unpalatable limits, contrasted no less favorably with the loose food-their meat whence the blood was extracted principles he sometimes heard advanced in the -their cakes without butter, their bread without tap-room. Noah's penurious habits were natural leaven, were all so many objects of suspicion to to a man who came so hard by the few pence he Pavel's unformed mind. He imagined that his happened to possess; and his strict observance of Creator rejoiced in his abstaining from meat on a the forms of his religion seemed respectable in Friday, but could neither understand nor believe one who did not neglect practical morality. From that hog's flesh could be an abomination in His acknowledging the merit of his host, and the ineyes. He believed in the merits of a scapulary, variable kindness of Salome, to pitying their opbut viewed with scorn and derision the straps and pressed state, the transition was not difficult. It scarfs wherewith the Jews are in the habit of was still less so, from pity for the oppressed, to binding their brows and arms for prayer. Yet hatred for the oppressor. Now the Jew was a all this minutiæ of Jewish observance, which at good hater; for he had not escaped the darker first roused the terrors, and, later, provoked the lines that mark and mar the Parias of all times ridicule, of Pavel, is, after all, not much more and societies. Only Noah had, with sufficient closely allied to superstition than the mere cere- correctness, traced the evil to its source-the conmonies of most other religions. tempt and contumely from which his race suffered, to the oppression exercised against them. not rulers made other laws for them, he thought, the people would not have conceived that abhorrence for his people which the institutions of the state perpetually kept alive. In consequence of this view of things, Noah hated those in power with all the bitterness his own and his nation's wrongs could inspire; and though certainly far from entertaining towards any class of Christians the sympathies he bestowed on the Jews, yet he did not conceive for the serf the burning detestation which he felt against the authorities. Like most Jews, Noah was, in his secret heart, a leveller; disaffection being one of the many evils resulting from the pernicious system of stamping a set of human beings with social ostracism. Not only are such beings demoralized, but their demoralization and their discontent gangrene society to its core, working slowly but surely, hidden in its operation, but visible enough in its result. Noah had very little in him to distinguish him from the ordinary type of the Polish Jew, except, perhaps, a greater degree of native kindness than generally falls to the share of those who have to battle it out hard with life. His discontent-his feverish desire for change, since change must bring relief—his sympathy with all who suffered from any oppression whatever-his hatred to all oppressors his rectitude in some things, his want of rectitude in others, may all be traced to one and the same source-his social position. Thus the serf who had been flogged, the soldier who

Puerility, indeed, is part of man's nature, in which the sublime and the ludicrous are constantly struggling like light and shade. He has invented a word wherewith to dignify it-he calls it form; and brings it to bear on everything in life, even on his social intercourse; and as a matter of mere conventionality, the most refined and civilized circles in Europe indulge in prejudices as absurd as ever the Talmud inculcated, or the Brahmins taught. Cannot a man's worth be obscured by the manner in which he holds his hat, or pronounces a word? Is not a lady's social rank cast into doubt if she wear a ring on her forefinger? And do not a thousand other trifles, light as air, make the conventionalities of society the most frivolous of frivolities, the more absurd that they vary with every change of locality? When we see ladies, pink or blue, nay, even deeply philosophical, theological ladies, condescending to wear little rings through holes in their ears, however much habit may blind us to the ludicrous and barbarous nature of the ornament, methinks we should be more indulgent to the savage belle who passes a ring through her nose. The one is scarce less an unnatural practice than the other; but the absurdities to which habit has inured us, feel homely and comfortable, when unfamiliar ones startle us out of our propriety.

Time, however, wore off many of those acerbities which made Pavel feel and look at first like a hedgehog at bay; nor was it possible but Salome's soft bright eyes, and Noah's real kindness, deserted, were sure of comfort and assistance at beneath a rough exterior, should aid in dissipating them. The virtues, as well as the faults, of Noah, were precisely of a nature to correspond with those which the boy's fate and character rendered peculiar to himself. Habit, moreover, softens all discrepancies even in more advanced age;

the hand of Noah; nor would he scruple to deceive the lord by secret treaties with his steward, or to defraud the government by smuggling, because in his conscience he did not look upon either the lord or the government as the lawful possessors of the rights they exercised. This was a danger

ous school for any youth, more especially one the | in the tap-room. By degrees he became less surly victim of the most careless and unfeeling caprice. with the host and hostess themselves and the ensuDuring the first months no visit from the dread-ing summer decided the question. There is someed Jakubska, or even from her cousin, disturbed thing in the occupations of the country so natural Pavel. Remittances were regular, so Noah cared to man, and, especially, so congenial to boyhood, but little, and to the boy it was a relief. When that Pavel took heartily to them. He never was so far recovered as not to necessitate the sacrifice asked by Noah or his wife to perform any menial of one whole closet to his individual use, he was office; but in the fields, in the distillery and stainformed that he must share what he occupied ble, he voluntarily made himself useful. Early with some of the children; but this he resolutely in spring he received a visit from his cousin, who refused, and the Jews did not oppose his appro- asked to speak with the boy alone, and then expriating to himself some hay and straw in the plained that Jakubska had been detained so long loft, the only indulgence which he claimed. from him by illness, and that now being deprived of the use of her limbs, she desired passionately to see him. "If you will come along with me,' added the man, "I think you could sit with her an hour without the neighbors becoming aware of it."

Pavel resolutely refused.

"She is your own mother," said the cousin, coldly.

"No!" said Pavel; "she is a wicked witch who has cast an enchantment upon me!"

"It is a strange one," replied the cousin,“ for she has to pay for it; it is she who pays your pension; are you aware of that?"

"Bah! she gets the money elsewhere," an

Salome one day proposed to give Pavel some books which had been left with them in payment of a bad debt; but Noah negatived the proposal, insisting that such an indulgence would be poison to him at the time being. "You see," he said, "it is not the intention of his friends to make a fine gentleman of him; perhaps they have not the means of doing so; and even had they such means, and such desires, I do not consider that education conduces in any way to the happiness or prosperity of the friendless, like himself. Were I, indeed, his natural adviser, he who entrusted him to be the playmate of a young count, I should insist that the father or family repay the evil done him by such injudicious associations, by now pro-swered the boy. viding him with proper schooling and means of This was too true. Pavel's cousin knew not earning a livelihood by the education thus be- how to parry an attack so direct, and shrugging stowed-I should appeal to their every sentiment his shoulders, he left the house without another of humanity and justice. Even as it is, I might, effort towards softening the young heart that was perhaps, feel tempted to make an appeal of the hardening under his eyes. On the whole. he kind in the child's behalf, if I but knew where thought it advisable that he should not appear in the application should be made, though I much his vicinage, and considered Jakubska's request as doubt its success; but, as matters stand, it is bet-sheer folly, to prevent the repetition of which he ter to keep the books out of his way. How many vassals' children have been thus made toys to be flung aside the moment they become wearisome, or another whim had taken possession of their patron's mind. The great think but of their own passing gratification—and, after all, what is a vassal a thing that belongs to another who is free to do with it as he likes! No one has a right to inquire-no one need ever know how he has been trifled with! Under such a system what is the human heart-its agonies, its pleasures as immaterial as the struggles of the bird in the fowler's net. A thousand times better than have to do with the caprices of such beings, to live unnoted, unknown. by them. He who is not of them should beware of them-keep aloof from them as he would keep his treasure from the spoiler's hand. No, no," continued Noah, "he will not remain long thus idly brooding-he will come round of himself-he will soon ask to share in our humble avocations, and they will brace his mind and his body."

It was impossible, indeed, on recruiting his full strength, that total want of all occupation should not fall heavily on Pavel. He first familiarized himself with the stable-boy, Peter, the only other Christian in the establishment, for an old attraction made him feel more comfortable in the stable than

took care to report Pavel's undutiful answer with every cruel addition he could invent. He knew the old woman dared not, if she would, abandon the boy, and if it cooled her maternal feelings towards him, he thought it was as much gain for all parties.

The ensuing winter passed very unlike the preceding one. Pavel was active in the forest, picking up wood, lading the sledges, and guiding one occasionally himself-in fact, showing a decided inclination to sharing Peter's duties. In the house, too, his knowledge of reading and writing made him useful in inditing of letters and keeping accounts, and he frequently accompanied Peter in his excursions to the nearest towns. Whenever his aid was wanted, he now gave it cheerfully, seeming to take a sort of pride in defying fate; but his kindlier feelings were seldom brought into activity, for though Salome was gentle and motherly, and her children quiet and inoffensive, there was something in the total want of education, in the dirty, penurious habits, and, above all, in the difference of religion, that put a bar between them and his affections; besides that youthfulness of feeling that might have made Salome's young family playmates for him-that freshness, which is early life's sweetest portion, seemed faded within his breast forever.

"And that boy?-a Jew of course?" said the toll collector. At that question the blood mounted into Pavel's cheeks. He was horrified at being mistaken for a Jew.

and

"He is a Christian," answered Noah. "Then I can't tax him," said the man, 66 yet I feel sure you are cheating us of our due; however, let it pass-I have no time to-day to examine into the matter. Don't you see that your betters are waiting? March!"

The Jew, glad to get off without further insult, now glided and shuffled through the country peo

One morning-it was Saturday and market day-Noah having business in town, proposed to Pavel to accompany him. It being a half holiday, and, moreover, fair time, all the country folks in the neighborhood, clad in their best and brightest habiliments, would be on the road. Noah had received from his wife for his birthday, not a week back, a new gown of rich silk, trimmed with fur of the red fox, a luxury very unusual with him who, like most Jews of that low class, cared but little for the proprieties of dress. Still, as a present from his wife, and a costly one, the first, indeed, of price she had in-ple that crowded the gate, like an eel, but not one dulged in since their union, Noah valued it ex- bold shove dared he give. The children needed tremely, and strutted about not a little proud of no explanation of the silk robe and long black it. His children surrounded him with capering curling beard of Noah, and by raising their findelight, and Salome's soft, dark eyes beamed with gers to their chins, and various other graceful honest affection. Noah's features, ordinarily ob-motions expressive of infantine and popular descured by the negligence of toilet and the slavish rision, and with sundry imitations of Jewish exhumility of his air, were originally fine and bold; pression of pain and disappointment, disturbed the and as he stood thus in the bosom of his family, equanimity of the wayfarers. Not once did Noah with no one before whom to quail, in the full dig-turn towards them other but reproachful glances— nity of man, father and master, no one could have" for how can I be angry with them," he said, believed that those features and that mien could," who know not what they do? They are taught at times, be debased with the cringing servility peculiar to the Polish Jew.

"But not less dear," said Noah.

The day was mild and cheering. Pavel and his companion chatted of one thing and another as they went along, and the plain good sense of the Jew made ample amends for what he might want in learning. Having got a lift by the way, they arrived in good time at the town gate, where they were stopped by the police there stationed to answer the usual inquiries.

no better. It is their parents, their schoolmasters, who are cruel and unjust, not these young hearts which they train to be as hard as their own. But the oppressive laws, not merely enacted at earlier periods, but constantly renewed and enforced against us, have most to answer for. It is they that incite to aggression the unthinking and uncharitable. How foolish, then, to quarrel with the effect instead of the cause! Against the cause we should direct the whole force of our resentment. The example of the great works for good or for evil-and it is to them that all lessons should be addressed-for the sins of this world, like the devastating hail, fall from above."

"Are you not afraid of speaking thus here?" said the boy.

"This street," replied Noah, "is occupied by those who suffer and feel like me-it is a Jew street."

"Your name?" There was no necessity for the other interrogatories, Noah's costume suffi- "It is here, then, that Salome wishes she could ciently attesting the race to which he belonged-live?" inquired Pavel, "that the boys may go to "then pay your tax."* school-synagogue as you call it? It would not At that moment a man pressed forward, thrust-tempt me, though-it is a villanous, dirty street." ing Noah rudely aside, to pay entrance duty for "We are allowed to live in no other, and I his pigs; it was exactly the same amount per prefer God's free air in the open country to mophead as that demanded for the Jew. Noah waited ing myself up in this narrow, unwholesome with his usual enforced meekness till the pig-driver place. Many and many a weak brother has been had paid his toll; but when about to deliver his induced, by the frivolous consideration of possessmoney a new-comer pushed him arrogantly aside, ing a fine house in a fine quarter of the town, to expectorating as he did so, and crossing himself renounce the God of his fathers-renegades that by way of shield against the contamination with make but false Christians! Traitors to the new which the very presence of a Jew tainted the air. as to the old faith, they have gradually brought Noah bore all calmly, like one inured by long doubt and scepticism into the enemy's camp, more habit to every possible form of insult. His cheek formidable weapons far than any other we could neither flushed nor paled. He preserved a pas devise. Think you that a little sprinkling of siveness which might have been mistaken for ap-water can efface from the hearts of those Chrisathy by those who knew him not; but Pavel instinctively knew it to be stoicism.

*No Jew was suffered to enter any town where he was not a licensed indweller without paying toll.

tianized professors to whom the youths of rank are entrusted, the principles and sentiments inherent in their Jewish blood? and think you that they fail to instil those principles and sentiments into