Of my own history I do not know that it is needful to tell very much. My grandfather came to Poland from Vienna, whence he had been expelled with all the Jews of the Arch-Duchy, to please the Jesuit-ridden Empress Margaret, who thus testified her gratitude to Heaven for her recovery from an accident that had befallen her at a court ball. I have heard the old man tell how trumpeters proclaimed in the streets the Emperor's edict, and how every petition proved as futile as the great gold cup and the silver jug and basin presented by the Jews to the Imperial couple as they came out of church, after the thanksgiving ceremony. It was an ill star that guided my grandfather's feet towards Poland. The Jews of Poland had indeed once been paramount in Europe, but the Cossack massacres and the disruption of the kingdom had laid them low, and they spawned beggars who wandered through Europe, preaching and wheedling with equal hyper-subtlety. My father at any rate escaped mendicancy, for he managed to obtain a tiny farm in the north-east of Lithuania, though what with the exactions of the Prince of the estate, and the brutalities of the Russian regiments quartered in the neighborhood, his life was bitter as the waters of Marah. The room in which I was born constituted our whole hut, which was black as a charred log within and without, and never saw the sunlight save through rents in the paper which covered the crossed stripes of pine that formed the windows. In winter, when the stove heated the hovel to suffocation, and the wind and rain drove back the smoke through the hole in the roof that served for chimney, the air was almost as noxious to its human inhabitants as the smoke to the vermin in the half-washed garments that hung across poles. We sat at such times on the floor, not daring to sit higher, for fear of suffocation in the denser atmosphere hovering over us; and I can still feel the drip, drip, on my head, of the fat from the sausages that hung a-drying. In a corner of this living and sleeping room stood the bucket of clean water, and alongside it the slop-pail and the pail into which my father milked the cow. Poor old cow! She was quite like one of the family, and often lingered on in the room after being milked.