When the scissors-grinder began to come into the neighborhood and Mendel began to give him employment in his vocation, he at once recognized that here was an interesting and extremely puzzling personality. It was a real problem of the kind Mendel Greenberger loved to solve, but it defied his powers of analysis and classification. For the life of him he could not make out who or what the handsome, pleasant-spoken young man, with the lowly trade apparently so unsuited for him, was. His type was absolutely non-distinctive. As far as appearance went there was no telling whether he was Jew or Gentile, and no reason to assign him to any one European nation rather than another. His conduct and manner were just as little guide, for, though polite and manifestly well-bred, he had no mannerisms of any kind. Baffled by his inability to “locate” his new acquaintance by these usually infallible indications, Mendel resorted to the expedient of addressing him in various languages. But here Mendel “tripped up,” so to speak, even more emphatically than before. The scissors-grinder spoke, with one exception, every European language which Mendel did, but with superior accent and correcter grammar. His English was that of one to the manner born, though devoid of either Cockney accent or Yankee twang; his French would have done credit to any _boulevardier_; his German was as faultlessly exact in construction and pronunciation as that of any compatriot of Goethe or Schiller; and as for Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, to say nothing of the minor tongues, Bohemian, Roumanian, Servian, Greek, Turkish, he spoke them all with perfect ease and fluency. It mattered not in what tongue the puzzled Mendel addressed him, the scissors-grinder always answered in the same, but without betraying any surprise and as though it were the natural and to-be-expected thing to speak any and every idiom in existence. But, as already stated, there was one exception to the polyglot ability of the scissors-grinder. He did not know Yiddish, for when Mendel addressed him in that tongue, he did not understand him well and answered in German, the tongue most nearly related to the dialect of the Jews of the Slavonic lands, and without using any Hebrew words or phrases with which even the German Jews habitually interlard their speech. Mendel had to confess to himself that the scissors-grinder was an enigma, which even he, with his great knowledge of human beings, could not solve. Of two things, however, he felt certain: first, that the scissors-grinder was originally of far higher social station than his humble vocation would suggest, for his manners and bearing, and, above all, his extraordinary linguistic attainments, were only explainable on the ground of refined surroundings and the best of education; secondly, that he was no Jew, for his ignorance of Yiddish and Hebrew and his manifest unfamiliarity with Jewish ideas and usages showed conclusively that he had had no Jewish