The _yamelke_ was nowhere to be found. It was a very hot evening and it produced on Philip an unholy delight to see his father sitting there in the close heat, with bright red carpet slippers, thin black trousers, a thin alpaca coat--and to crown all, the stately and stuffy tall hat, malevolent and quite definitely absurd. It was towards the end of the evening that Philip lifted his cap to scratch his head over some knotty point in the _chumish_, the Pentateuch, they were translating. He had wholly forgotten the abstracted _yamelke_, so, whilst his own cap fell with a soft slur on the table before him, the _yamelke_ sat revealed like a toad under a lifted stone. Reb Monash looked up. It was too late to hide the _yamelke_. Reb Monash's eyes glinted unpleasantly. _Chayder_ drew to an immediate end. The drizzle falling beyond the _chayder_ window next day was like a curtain of liquid soot. The interview between Reb Monash and Philip on the conclusion of last evening's episode had made them both, for different, for opposite, reasons, very tired. Philip, though the hard form where he sat left him at no time unconscious of his wounds, was only a little more listless than his father. His mind was too numbed even to appreciate the exquisite irony of his letter to his "esteemed and beloved parents." When the ritual of "Hebrew" recommenced, it was only with an effort that he suspended the mechanical scrawling of his pen. The dirge of question and reply proceeded mournfully, broken only by the occasional "where holds one?" like the surface of a pond on a dull day when the fish seem to rise rather to assert their rights than to satisfy their hunger. Oh, to get away from it all, mused Philip dimly. To where there are trees and grass like Longton Park, but freer, larger. To go there alone and to come back to mother, perhaps with an offering of cowslips, whatever they were. There would be a bird there who would sing. Not like a canary. He couldn't bear the singing of canaries. They reminded him of a pale girl whom he saw sometimes at a window of the hat-and-cap factory. She sang sometimes, like a canary, ever so sweetly, but a captive. He had once seen a canary cage hanging on an outside wall. A great rain-storm had burst, but the people on the doorstep had gone in, forgetting all about the bird. He had knocked at their door and told them, and though the man had sworn at him, he took the bird in, a sickly sodden mass, greyish-yellow. That bird had not sung again. It uttered only a little broken cheep each morning when the sun came. Now out there ... Oh, what was all this useless droning, droning about ... "_Pilpelim?_" "Pepper!" ... out there, when the rain came, there would be thick branches to shelter that singing bird. He would walk alone, clean, free. "Alone I walked, I walked alone." There was music in that! "Alone I walked, I walked alone." Yes of course! the sense was quite