He tried to earn a little by being a porter or burden-bearer for one of the merchants of the town at very scanty wages, but just as he was about to get the place, along came a younger and stronger man and offered to do the work for even less. Needless to say, the latter was selected. He thought he could earn his livelihood by being a _Mithassek_, that is to say, one who watches at the bed of the dead and performs the funeral ablutions and rites; but it was provokingly healthy that season. No one died for a long time; and when at last the angel of death did claim one of the Hebrew residents of Novo-Kaidansk—a wealthy _Baal Ha-Bayith_ he was, too, whose family always paid liberally for all services rendered to any of its members—it just happened that they had a poor relative, an aged man of greater learning and stricter piety than Yerachmiel; and so, of course, he was preferred, and Yerachmiel was not considered at all. At one time he dealt in fruit, purchasing a small stock with a sum of money which a pitying philanthropist had given him in order to set him up in business; but the demand for fruit was very slack just then, and in a short time Yerachmiel decided to retire from that line of commerce with the capital which he had originally possessed, that is to say, nothing. He made a dozen other attempts to coax the unwilling world into providing him with sustenance, but each attempt ended with the same result—failure, and caused him to sink appreciably lower in the estimation of Shprinze, whose temper grew bitterer and whose tongue sharper with every new proof of her husband’s _Shlemihligkeit_. In fact, the term _Shlemihl_ no longer harmonized with her conception of her husband’s worthlessness; it was too mild, too utterly inadequate. She began to address him by no other term than _Shlamazzalnik_, that is, one doomed and predestined to perpetual misfortune; and soon the neighbors and the other townspeople, and even the children on the streets, took up the cry, and “Yerachmiel Shlamazzalnik” resounded from one end to the other of the dusty highways of Novo-Kaidansk whenever the poor fellow made his appearance. Poor Yerachmiel! He used to console himself by saying that he was the equal in some respects of the great Ibn Ezra, the renowned Hebrew exegete and poet of the Middle Ages, for the latter was also an incurable _Shlemihl_ and _Shlamazzalnik_. Yerachmiel used to think he was reading of his own experiences when he read the complaint of Ibn Ezra: “Were I to deal in candles, The sun would shine alway; And if ’twere shrouds I’d handle, Then death would pass away.”