They had but one child, a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy of eight, whom they loved with the passionate devotion of which parental hearts are capable when they have but one object upon which to concentrate their affection. He was literally the apple of their eyes. His father cared for his intellectual welfare, and provided the best and most highly esteemed _Melammedim_ to introduce him into the intricacies of the Jewish education of that time; and the lad, who had a bright and acute intellect, responded well to these efforts, and at eight was quite a little prodigy of Biblical and Talmudical learning. His mother, on the other hand, looked after his physical well-being, fed him on delicate food, clothed him in a _jubitza_ of extra fine material, brushed and combed his little _peoth_ until they shone, and set her pride upon making him finer and brighter in appearance than his comrades. Like Hannah of old, she had determined to dedicate her offspring to the Lord. Already in imagination she saw him seated upon the rabbi’s seat, greeted by the plaudits of admiring thousands; and so strong was her faith in that future for her son that she rarely called him by his given name, which was Saul Isaac, but always referred to him as “my little rabbi.” Thus the love, the hopes, the ambition of these parents were all wrapped up in this, their only son. Troublous times were just beginning then for the descendants of Jacob living on Muscovite soil. Nicholas the First sat on the throne of the Czars; and, like so many of the Russian potentates before and after him, could find no more pressing task to perform than to convert his Hebrew subjects to Christianity. He had no respect for the conscientious scruples which kept the Jews faithful to their ancestral religion; he could not appreciate the heroism with which they endured every conceivable suffering and martyrdom rather than grow recreant to the allegiance plighted to their God. In his eyes they were only a mass of obdurate, stubborn, and pestiferous heretics, who refused to see the beauties and accept the salvation of Christianity. He thought and thought and cudgelled his brains to devise some scheme by which to overcome the endless resistance of Judaism to its own dissolution, and finally evolved a plan which for sheer deviltry and refinement of heartless brutality would have done credit to the blackest fiend in the legions of Satan; and this, too, in the name of the religion which claims love and tenderness as its own special prerogative, and calmly assumes all the progress of humanity and civilization as its doing.