“Then Fortune smiled upon him. An unexpected piece of luck, a bold enterprise, a few quick, profitable ventures, and he became independent. He made me share his good fortune. We started one of those little banking houses on the East Side, and so great was the confidence that all who knew him possessed in him, that in less than a year we were a well-known, reliable establishment, with prospects that no outsider would ever have dreamed of. Through all the days of prosperity he remained a devout Jew. Not a feast passed unobserved. Not a ceremony went unperformed. Not an act of devotion, of kindness, or of charity prescribed by the Talmud was omitted by my friend. “Then came the black day—the great, panic of six years ago—do you remember it? It came suddenly, on a Friday afternoon, like a huge storm-cloud, threatening to burst the next morning. “They came to him—all his customers—in swarms, to ask him if he would keep his banking place open the next day. ‘No!’ he said. ‘To-morrow is the Sabbath!’ ‘You will be ruined!’ they cried. ‘We will be ruined!’ ‘Friends,’ he said, in his quiet way, ‘I have enough money laid aside to guard you against ruin, even if all my establishment be wiped from the face of the earth. But to-morrow is the Sabbath. I have observed the Sabbath for nearly sixty years. I must not fail to-morrow.’ “And when the morrow came the bank failed, and they brought the news to him in the synagogue. But he gave no heed to them; he was listening to the reading of the law. They came to tell him that banks were crashing everywhere, that the bottom had fallen out of the world of business and finance. But he was listening to the words that were spoken by Moses on Sinai. “And,” the narrator’s eyes filled, and the tears began to roll down his cheeks, “on the Monday that followed he gave, to every man and to every woman and to every child that had trusted him, every penny that he had saved, and he made me give every penny that I had saved. And when all was gone, and the last creditor had gone away, paid in full, he turned to me and said, ‘Man should accustom himself to say of everything that God does that it is for the best!’ “And the next day—yes, the very next day—we applied for work in a sweater’s shop, and we have been working there ever since. “We were too old to begin daring ventures over again. I would have clung to the money we had saved, but he—he was so good, so honest, that the very thought of it filled me with shame. And now he is worn out. “In a few days he will die, and I will be left to fight on alone. “But, oh, my friend, there, lying on that couch, you see a Jew! “Would you convert him? What would you have him believe? To what would you change his faith? Ah, you will say there are not many like him. No! Would to God there were! It would be a happier world.