The truth was that Moses was in doubt as to the right course to pursue. His watch told him that he might as well make an exception to-day from his regular practice and stay at home, for he could never hope to be on time at the services, or even present during any considerable portion of them. On the other hand, his conscience smote him greatly at having overslept himself; and thus incurred the danger of breaking his life rule, of always beginning the day in the house of God, and in the words which the ship captain once addressed to the prophet Jonah when he had gone to sleep in the midst of all the turmoil of the storm, it called to him, “What aileth thee, O sleeper? Arise, cry out unto thy God.” After a minute’s hesitation conscience won the battle over comfort. Moses hastily sprang from his couch, made his simple toilet as speedily as possible, and in something less than twenty minutes was on his way to the little synagogue (“place of prayer” was the unassuming name which the worshippers themselves gave it) of the Congregation of the Sons of Peace. While he is on his way thither, we will take occasion to describe him to our readers; for many of them, no doubt, are at a loss to understand what kind of a person he is, and particularly fail to comprehend why he should be so dreadfully put out at the mere possibility of being absent from prayers one morning, a thing which, I am sure, would never disturb the majority of my worthy readers in their mental tranquillity. [Illustration: HE WAS NOTHING BUT A COMMONPLACE, EVERY-DAY PEDDLER _Page 131_] Moses Levinsky was a very ordinary and insignificant individual, such as you might pass a thousand times in the street and never pay any attention to. He was nothing but a commonplace, every-day peddler who wandered from morning to evening through the streets of the great metropolis, with a huge basket suspended in front of him, filled to overflowing with a miscellaneous assortment of goods—suspenders, shoe laces, pins, needles, tape, handkerchiefs, stockings, and what not—and endeavored to induce his fellow-beings to purchase sufficient of his store to provide him with a meagre livelihood. He had straight and regular features, of a rather handsome Semitic type, though worn and furrowed, not so much by years—he was only forty-three—as by care and anxiety; his hair and large irregular beard were black, heavily streaked with gray, and his clothes and close-fitting derby hat were decidedly shabby. All in all, he was not an imposing figure; and when we add to the unimpressiveness of his exterior the fact that he had a nervous, deprecatory manner, and looked around him with timid, apprehensive eyes, and also that he was a very indifferent master of the vernacular, which he spoke hesitatingly and with a pronounced Slavonic-Jewish accent, the reader will at once realize that he was of the type which low comedians love to caricature and street urchins to mock at, if not to treat worse.