In the days when the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim were divided by walls of sentiment and pride, as difficult to surmount as the walls that separated patrician from plebeian in ancient Rome, an Ashkenazi youth married a Sephardi maiden. It happened some four hundred or five hundred years ago. Youth and maiden are dust, their romance is forgotten, and we owe them an apology for disturbing their memory. Let us only add that the youth’s name was Zalman. May Mr. and Mrs. Zalman rest in peace! * * * * * Zalman, the tailor, lived in Essex Street on the same floor with the Rabbi Elsberg. Zalman possessed two treasures, each a rarity of exquisite beauty, each vying with the other for supremacy in his affections. The one was a wine glass of Venetian make, wonderful in its myriad-hued colouring, its fragile texture, and its rare design. The mate of it rests in one of the famous museums of Italy, and the connoisseurs came from far and near to feast their eyes upon Zalman’s piece. Money, in sums that would have made Zalman a rich man in that neighbourhood, had been offered to him for this treasure, but he always shook his head. “It has been in my family for hundreds of years,” he would say, “and I cannot part with it. Years ago—many, many years ago—our family was wealthy, but now I have nothing left save this one wine glass. I would rather die than lose it.” His visitors would depart with feelings of mingled wonder and rage; wonder that so priceless a gem should be in the possession of a decrepit, untidy, poverty-stricken East Side tailor; and rage that he should be so stubborn as to cling to it in spite of the most alluring offers that were made to him. Zalman’s other treasure was his daughter Barbara, whose name, like the wine glass, had descended from some long-forgotten Spanish or Italian ancestress. All the lavish praise that the most enthusiastic lover of things beautiful had ever lavished upon that wonderful wine glass would have applied with equal truth to Barbara. Excepting that Barbara was distinctly modern. Reuben sat in the Rabbi Elsberg’s sitting-room, frowning and unhappy; the rabbi, puffing reflectively at a long pipe, gazing at him in silence. Through the walls they could hear Barbara singing. Barbara always sang when she was merry, and Barbara was merry, as a rule, from the moment she left her bed until she returned to it. The rabbi took a longer puff than usual, and then asked Reuben: “What said her father?” Reuben gulped several times as if the words that crowded to his lips for utterance were choking him. “It is well for him that he is her father,” he finally said. “I would not have listened to so much abuse from any other living man.” (Reuben, by the way, had a most determined-looking chin, and there was something very earnest in the cut of his features.)