"You don't curse enough," the beggar often protested. "But why should one curse a man who refuses one's request?" the philosopher would persist. "Besides, he is embittered thereby, and only the more likely to refuse." "Cork your philosophy, curse you!" the beggar would cry. "How often am I to explain to you that cursing terrifies people." "Not at all," Maimon would mutter, terrified. "No? What is Religion, but Fear?" "False religion, if you will. But true religion, as Maimonides says, is the attainment of perfection through the knowledge of God and the imitation of His actions." Nevertheless, when they begged together, Maimon produced an inarticulate whine that would do either for a plea or a curse. When he begged alone, all the glib formulæ he had learnt from the _Schnorrer_ dried up on his tongue. But his silence pleaded more pitifully than his speech. For he was barefooted and almost naked. Yet amid all these untoward conditions his mind kept up its interminable twisting and turning of the universe; that acute analysis for which centuries of over-subtlety had prepared the Polish Jew's brain, and which was now for the first time applied scientifically to the actual world instead of fantastically to the Bible. And it was perhaps when he was lying on the bare earth that the riddle of existence--twinkling so defiantly in the stars--tortured him most keenly. Thus passed half a year. Maimon had not learnt to beg, nor had the beggar acquired the rudiments of morality. How often the philosopher longed for his old friend Lapidoth--the grave-digger's son-in-law--to talk things over with, instead of this carnal vagabond. They had been poverty-stricken enough, those two, but oh! how differently they had taken the position. He remembered how merrily Lapidoth had pinned his dropped-off sleeve to the back of his coat, crying, "Don't I look like a _Schlachziz_ (nobleman)?" and how he in return had vaunted the superiority of his gaping shoes: "They don't squeeze at the toes." How they had played the cynic, he and the grave-digger's son-in-law, turning up with remorseless spade the hollow bones of human virtue! As convincedly as synagogue-elders sought during fatal epidemics for the secret sins of the congregation, so had they two striven to uncover the secret sinfulness of self-deceived righteousness. "Bad self-analysis is the foundation of contentment," Lapidoth had summed it up one day, as they lounged on the town-wall.