serpent, visits them; he is clad in diamonds and costly stones, and dazzles the older brother with his splendor. He, too, would like to be rich. He follows the stranger out into the woods, and seats himself at his side to inquire of the manner of acquiring such wealth. "What a fool you are to allow your opportunities to slip by," says the serpent. "You do not know that the sweat of your brother is nothing but diamonds, the tears are brilliants, his blood pearls." The elder brother returns home, beats his younger brother to elicit blood and sweat and tears. His wealth grows, but not his happiness, for he suffers as much from fear of his hoarded riches as his brother sighs under tears. They finally fall to blows,--but here the poet purposely breaks his story, for he will not undertake to tell the end of their hostility. The choir sings the ten o'clock song, when all must go to rest: "You are rested, and at times you dream of--a loaf of bread! The clock strikes ten, the work is done,--good night, madame!" The modiste answers: "Be back early in the morning!" This is the bare skeleton of the poem, of whose painful beauties nothing but a perusal in the original can give an adequate idea. There is the making of a great poet in one who can sing like that; but Perez has chosen, like Rabinowitsch, to devote his best energies to prose, and to this part of his activity we shall return later. Of the minor poems of this period there might be mentioned those by David Frischmann, Rosa Goldstein, M. W. Satulowski, M. M. Penkowski, W. Kaiser, Paltiel Samostschin. Frischmann has produced but a few poems, but they are all of excellent quality. His best is a ballad, 'Ophir,'[72] but he has also written some clever satires in verse. Samostschin,[73] who had begun composing in the sixties, has translated several poems, especially from the Hebrew of J. L. Gordon, and has written some clever feuilletons in rhymes. Minchas Perel has published a small collection of poems on the Fall of Jerusalem, of which the first, 'The Night of the Destruction of Jerusalem,' is a very spirited and dramatic story of the event. Another good book of poems is 'The Harp,' by G. O. Hornstein. Although some of them are in the style of the coupletists, others betray original talent that might be well developed. The best of these is the ballad, 'The Cat and the Mouse,' an allegory of Jewish persecutions, in which the Jew is represented as a mouse living on the fat of the oil candelabrum in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the Romans and other nations are represented as cats who drive the mouse out of her abiding place.