The Red Beadle shook his head. "There is nothing but Nature," he said obstinately, as his hot iron polished the boot between his knees. He was called the Red Beadle because, though his irreligious opinions had long since lost him his synagogue appointment and driven him back to his old work of bootmaking, his beard was still ruddy. "Yes, but who made Nature?" retorted his new employer, his strange, scholarly face aglow with argument, and the flame of the lamp suspended over his bench by strings from the ceiling. The other clickers and riveters of the Spitalfields workshop, in their shocked interest in the problem of the origin of Nature, ceased for an instant breathing in the odors of burnt grease, cobbler's wax, and a coke fire replenished with scraps of leather. "Nature makes herself," answered the Red Beadle. It was his declaration of faith--or of war. Possibly it was the familiarity with divine things which synagogue beadledom involves that had bred his contempt for them. At any rate, he was not now to be coerced by Zussmann Herz, even though he was fully alive to the fact that Zussmann's unique book-lined workshop was the only one that had opened to him, when the more pious shoemakers of the Ghetto had professed to be "full up." He was, indeed, surprised to find Zussmann a believer in the Supernatural, having heard whispers that the man was as great an "Epicurean" as himself. Had not Zussmann--ay, and his wigless wife, Hulda, too--been seen emerging from the mighty Church that stood in frowsy majesty amid its tall, neglected box-like tombs, and was to the Ghetto merely a topographical point and the chronometric standard? And yet, here was Zussmann an assiduous attendant at the synagogue of the first floor--nay, a scholar so conversant with Hebrew, not to mention European, lore, that the Red Beadle felt himself a Man-of-the-Earth, only retaining his superiority by remembering that learning did not always mean logic. "Nature make herself!" Zussmann now retorted, with a tolerant smile. "As well say this boot made itself! The theory of Evolution only puts the mystery further back, and already in the Talmud we find--" "_Nature_ made the boot," interrupted the Red Beadle. "Nature made you, and you made the boot. But nobody made Nature." "But what is Nature?" cried Zussmann. "The garment of God, as Goethe says. Call Him Noumenon with Kant or Thought and Extension with Spinoza--I care not." The Red Beadle was awed into temporary silence by these unknown names and ideas, expressed, moreover, in German words foreign to his limited vocabulary of Yiddish.