These two at least ought to be united. To strive after their unification is a debt every Yiddish writer owes his public. Only, the writers have too many private debts beside--one requires at least one additional Parnosseh, as he said. * * * * * My reflections about an additional Parnosseh were broken in upon by a few sharp notes on the postillion's horn. But I did not leave the chaise. I was just feeling a little warmer, and the sun had begun to pour in his beams. I got a new neighbor and, thanks to the bright daylight, I saw his face plainly and even recognized him. It was an old acquaintance, we had skated together as children, played at bakers--we were almost comrades--then _I_ went to the dingy, dirty Cheder, and he, to the free, lightsome "gymnasium."[5] When _I_ did not know the lesson, I was beaten; when I answered right, they pinched my cheek--it hurt either way. _He_ was sometimes kept in and sometimes he got "fives;"[6] _I_ broke my head over the Talmud; he broke his over Greek and Latin. But we stuck together. We lived on neighborly terms; he taught me to read in secret, lent me books, and in after years we turned the world upside down as we lay on the green grass beside the river. I wanted to invent a kind of gunpowder that should shoot at great distances, say one hundred miles; he, a balloon in which to mount to the stars and bring the people "up there" to a sense of order and enlightenment. We were dreadfully sorry for the poor world, she was stuck in the mud--and how to get her out? Ungreased wheels, lazy horses, and the driver--asleep! Then I married, and he went to a university. We never corresponded. I heard later that he had failed, and, instead of a doctor, had become an apothecary somewhere in a small country town.... I all but cried for joy when my new neighbor entered the chaise, and my heart grew warm; my hands stretched themselves out; my whole body leaned toward him, but I held myself back--I held myself back with all my strength. There you are! I thought. It is Yanek Polnivski, our late sequestrator's son. He was my playfellow, he had a large embrace and wanted to put his arms round the whole world and kiss its every limb, except the ugly growths which should be cut away. Only--there you are again! Present-day times. Perhaps he is an anti-Semite, breathing death and destruction in the newspapers; perhaps now we Jews are the excrescences that need removing from Europe's shapely nose. He will measure me with a cold glance, or he may embrace me, but tell me, at the same time, that I am not as other Jews. But I was mistaken. Polnivski recognized me, fell upon my neck, nor had I spoken a word before he asked me how I liked "this vile anti-Semitism." "It is," he said to me, of course in Polish, "a kind of cholera--an epidemic." "Some say it is political."