When the stranger had finished his tale, Benjamin Dalinski, who had listened in wonderment to the singular narrative, said to him: “Truly, thy tale is strange and interesting; but dost thou not think that thou didst act foolishly? Hadst thou remained in the faith of thy forefathers thou wouldst not have lost the friendship of thy Jewish benefactors, nor have aroused the hatred of thy Gentile neighbors. Thou couldst have remained in peace in thy native land and perhaps have become in later years a great man among thy people; whereas now thou art an exile and a fugitive, and who knows what will be thy lot here in this land?” Abraham gazed at him a moment as though he did not understand his words and then answered with indignation as one who repudiates a sinful and unworthy suggestion. “I would rather eat bread with salt and drink blank water as a _Yehudi_ than be a prince and a great man among the Gentiles.” “Ah,” said Dalinski, “thou art indeed a proselyte of righteousness.” ISAAC AND ALICE They were good friends and true, were Isaac and Alice. To be sure, they were not exactly what most people would consider a well-assorted or naturally allied pair; for Isaac was a great strapping fellow of about thirty, who could speak Yiddish much better than English, while Alice was a sweet little girl of not quite five, whose childish prattle had a decidedly Yankee twang, and whose cradle had stood many thousands of miles from the spot where Isaac’s infantile eyes had first opened upon a strange and troublesome world. Yet that they were close friends was an undeniable, if somewhat unaccountable, fact. People who saw the stalwart young Lithuanian Hebrew carpenter, with the dark ringlets and raven beard and the golden-haired and blue-eyed little Down East maiden as they sat together and conversed during the midday hour when Isaac was eating his frugal lunch, or as they sauntered hand in hand through the streets of the little Massachusetts town, would often smile and wonder and make comments, sometimes jocular and sometimes sarcastic to each other; but neither Isaac nor Alice cared what anybody said. They were not afraid of scandal and were sublimely indifferent to public opinion. They were just good friends and that was all about it. They had been good friends from the first moment they met, several weeks after Isaac had set foot upon the hospitable shore of America, and had exhausted the greater part of his physical energy and about all of his financial resources and of his store of courage and hope in the effort to persuade the land of the free and the home of the brave to provide him with a livelihood. He had entered at the port of New York and tried for a week or so to find employment at his trade in the metropolis. But there must have been a plethora of carpenters in the great city at that time; for wherever he applied, the answer was the same, “No one wanted.” He had