"She begins to moan. I call for help, no one answers. There is a great noise from the fair--nobody hears _me_. Among a thousand men and women--and we might have been in a wilderness. I want to pull away my hands, go and call somebody, but she holds them tight. "Two, three minutes pass, it grows late, things are bad. I tear away my hands and I run thither. The circumcision was at the further end of the town. I fly along roads, over bales of merchandise, I fly and fly! It is all too long to me. It was July and yet I shivered with cold as I ran--there, there is Tsemach's house, where the ceremony has taken place." * * * * * "My heart beats as though I were a malefactor; I feel that _there_, at home, a soul is about to escape. There I am at the first window! I will not wait for the door, I will break a pane and get in that way. I run up to the window, I see the Rebbe is really in the room, he is walking up and down, I am about to enter like a housebreaker. I gather my remaining strength--there is a cry in my ears: Father, father! I leap." The narrator was out of breath. He takes a rest, lowers his eyes, which are full of large tears, and ends quietly with a broken voice: "But it was not to be! There was a heap of manure and stones before the window--I fell, and nearly broke my neck. I have a mark on my forehead to this day. When they brought me in to the Rebbe, he motioned me away with his hand. "When I got home (_how_ I got there, I don't know), she was lying on the floor--either she fell out of bed dying, or I pulled her out tearing away my hands." The listeners were silent, a stone weighed on our hearts. The Maskil soon recovered himself. "Well," he said, "blessed be the righteous Judge! Where are the riches?" The narrator wiped his eyes with his sleeve, gave a sad smile and continued: "Yes, I only wanted to show you what one means when one says, it was not to be. There came trouble after trouble--my wife died--the stall went to the bad because it was kept by a man--I was left alone with the children, and there wasn't a crust--I married again--I took an elderly woman on purpose, because I thought she would do for the stall, but I was taken in. There was a baby a year. Meanwhile our fairs fell off, and for a whole twelvemonth the stall wasn't worth a pinch of powder. "I determined to make an end of it--to give up the match-making, grow rich, and sit and study. _Aï_--how does one grow rich? I wrote to the brother-in-law of my first wife, to the treasurer, and asked him for God's sake to tell me when next there was a circumcision. "I got a message before the month was out, and hastened to Vorke. I stop nowhere, but go straight to the Rebbe." "And--a larger manure heap?" laughs the Maskil. The narrator gives him a vicious look. "The Vorke Tsaddik," he said, "went in for ritual cleanliness, his whole religion was ritual cleanliness."