On the evening of the following day, Abramowitsch betook himself, with a copy of a Hebrew drama he had composed, to the house of Gottlober. The latter smiled at the childish attempt of the young Talmudist, but he did not fail to recognize the talent that needed only the fostering care of a teacher to reach its full development, and he himself offered his services to him, and invited him to be a frequent caller at his house. Here, under the guidance of Gottlober's elder daughter, he received his first instruction in European languages, and in the rudiments of arithmetic. He swallowed with avidity everything he could get, and soon he was able to write a Hebrew essay on education which was printed in the _Hamagid_, and which attracted much attention at the time. His fate soon led him to Berdichev, "the Jewish Moscow," where he married for a second time, and settled down for many years. In 1859 his first serious work, still in Hebrew, was published. In 1863 began his Judeo-German career, in which he still continues, and which has made him famous among all who read in that language. The tradition of the Haskala came down to Abramowitsch in an uninterrupted succession, from Mendel Lefin through Ettinger and Gottlober. He, too, started out with the set purpose of spreading enlightenment among his people, and in his first two works we find a sharp demarkation between the two kinds of character, the ideal and the real. But he was too much of an artist by nature to persevere in his didactic attitude, and before long he abandoned entirely that field, to devote his undivided energy to the production of purely artistic works. Even his earlier books, in which he combats some public nuisance, differ materially from those of his predecessors in that they reflect not only conditions of society as they actually existed at his time, but in that his characters are true studies from nature. No one of his contemporaries reading, for example, his 'The Little Man,' could be in doubt of who was meant by this or that name. The portrait was so closely, and yet so artistically, copied from some well-known denizen of Berdichev that there could be no doubt as to the identity. There are even more essential points in his stories and dramas in which he widely departs from his predecessors. While these saw in a religious reform and in German culture a solution out of the degraded state into which their co-religionists had fallen, he preached that a reform from within must precede all regeneration from without. While they directed their attacks against the Khassidim as the enemies of light, and their Rabbis as their spiritual guides, he cautiously avoided all discussions of religion and culture, and sought in local communal reforms a basis for future improvements. To him the physical well-being of the masses was a more important question than their spiritual enlightenment, and according to his ideas a moral progress was only possible after the economical