The young men are only unfit for inspecting licenses or wares in the shop, but calves for the altar--as fast as you please! When God portioned out the world, the peasant took the soil, the fisher the river, the hunter the forest, the gardener the fruit-trees, the merchant the weights and measures, and so on; but the poet lingered in a wood. The nightingale sang to him, the trees whispered all sorts of wood-gossip into his ear, and his eyes, the poetical eyes, could not look away from the girl kneeling by the stream, from the tadpole in her hand. And he came too late for everything! The world, when he arrived, was already divided up. God had nothing left for him but clouds, rainbows, roses, and song-birds. He did not even find the young washerwoman on his way back, she had engaged herself somewhere as nurse. You have fancy! Create a world for yourself, said God. And people envied the poet--his world was the best! The peasant tilled his land with sweat and toil. The fisher is not idle--breaking ice in winter time is no joke. The hunter wearies hunting and pursuing. Pippins are not so easily made out of crab-apples! The merchant must bestir himself, if only about falsifying the weights and measures, else he dies of hunger. _One_ is the poet, who lies on his stomach and creates worlds! But it was a mistake. It turned out that his soul was only a camera-obscura that reflected the outside world with all its mud and pigs. So long as the pig keeps its place, it is not so bad, but when the pig gets into the foreground, the poet's world becomes as piggish as ours. The only people who remain to be envied are our two young men, the Shochet's son with the Shochet's son-in-law. Our world with its pigs doesn't fit in with their world of "blemish in the sacrifice." There is no connection between the two, no bridge, no link whatever. And as I have come into _their_ world out of _our_ world, the Gemorehs are shut, while the young faces express fear and wonder. The Shochet is not at home, he has gone to a neighboring village; that is why the calf is still lowing in the house. The wife has a little draper's shop. The daughter and a daughter-in-law stand by the fire and their faces are triply red. First, from pride in their husbands with their Torah; secondly, from the crackling fire, and thirdly, with confusion before a stranger, a man, and a "German" to boot. One caught a corner of her apron in her mouth, the other moved a few steps backward, as in the synagogue at the end of the Kedushah. Both look at me in astonishment from under low foreheads with hairbands of plaited thread. The young men, however, soon recover themselves. They have heard of the note-taker, and have guessed that I am he! The note-taking goes quickly. The Shochet gets four rubles a week, besides what he earns in the villages; were it not for the meat brought in from the villages round about, he would be doing very well.