When Reb Monash fell into his best anecdotic form, Philip sometimes, only a year or two ago, had been afraid to venture beyond the front door, in fear of _Kossacken_ galloping in with drawn sabres from Doomington Road. Indubitably the night was compact with their menace. Only gradually he shook off these alarms. England, he realized, the very filth of the Mitchen river impressing it upon him, and the grime of these grassless, clangorous streets, England was not Russia--a knowledge won only after thick agony and his brow soaked with midnight terror. Russia--the first Babylon--the dread, the enmity, faded into the murky Doomington skies. One scene remained with him to consummate this nightmare. Reb Monash told the story frequently. If he had played a part whereat women lowered their respectful eyes with a fleeting gesture of disapproval or impatience, his piety none the less was confirmed, if it needed confirmation, in the eyes of the Lord Himself. It was many years ago now, years before Philip was born. Reb Monash at last was emigrating from Russia to the Western world. His family and half a dozen other families had been packed into the uncovered emigrants' cart which was to take them to the railway terminus many leagues away, where they would entrain for Germany and Hamburg. It was a matter of no interest to the authorities that at most a dozen people could breathe comfortably and stretch their limbs in the vehicle they provided. Family after family was bundled in, every half-foot of extra space was crammed with bedding and the few household goods which, the more cumbrous they were, they found the more indispensable. Why, indeed, Reb Monash was emigrating he had not precisely satisfied himself. Though fear of a _pogrom_ hovered ever on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but liable, any wind of prejudice blowing, to streak the sky with more sanguine hues than sunset, this had been beyond memory so much a normal feature of existence that it could not have been the determining factor. If the traditional _wanderlust_ animated him, he was too much in demand as an orator in the synagogues hundreds of miles round Terkass to lack means to gratify his instinct. It cannot have been the sentiment that young Jewry in England and America (where he was intending to end his provisional pilgrimage) had so far fallen from grace that it needed the example of his physical presence before it could resume the narrow road; it can hardly have been that--for such ungodliness as prevailed in England and America needed to be seen before it could be imagined.