=4. Seed-time.=――He worked very hard, and the first thing he set himself to thoroughly learn was the German language. Germany had shown herself but a harsh stepmother to her adopted Jewish children; but he wisely thought if the children would cease to whimper in exasperating and half-understood dialect, if they would plead, or even on occasion scold back again, in the same good guttural German as their neighbours used, there was a better chance of their gaining for themselves a respectful hearing. It was scarcely a safe branch of learning, for the poor oppressed Jews of that period were so afraid of any encroachment on their Judaism, that not only was the study of the Law their favourite study, but any other was looked upon with jealous fear, and even in some cases prohibited by authority. But Moses Mendelssohn had no selfish object in his overmastering desire for knowledge. He meant to be a good Jew and a good German citizen at one and the same time, and to show his people how that could be done. The first writing work he did was translating parts of the Bible and the Prayers into good German. He might have made translations which would have found a ready sale among scholars, but he chose to do unpaid work, which would at best find but a very limited market, in order that his people might get to know the language of the country in which they lived, through the only books which there was any likelihood of their studying. He never lost sight of the one set purpose of his life――to be a guide to the perplexed, to help the people from darkness into light. There _is_ a royal road to learning, and they are kings who tread it disinterestedly, desiring to minister to the needs of their fellow-men. Some such kings carry burdens, and some bear lamps, and most are unrecognised as they trudge along, but nevertheless that road to learning is always _royal_. Moses Mendelssohn, poor and deformed as he was, and hemmed in by prejudice, found books to read and teachers to instruct him, and by the time he was one-and-twenty, was not only a good Hebrew scholar, which was a matter of course to a self-respecting Jew in those days, but an excellent mathematician and a fair classic, with an accurate and grammatical knowledge of the language and literature of his native country, and a tolerable mastery of French and of English.