There are many nameless graves in the "good place" at Barnow, and in some cases the punishment may have been well deserved. It is often the hardest that has reached the criminal. The black deed has been done, and the darkness of the Ghetto hid the crime. The Podolian Jews fear the world, and a Christian is supreme in the imperial court of justice. They do not like to deliver their sinful brother into the hands of an alien. They punish him themselves as they best can: he must spend much money on good objects, or make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or fast every second day for years. His crime is hidden as long as he lives, and it is only after his death that it is discovered. Some very curious things are also looked upon as crimes, and punished in the same way. Whoever hears of such can hardly help asking a very bitter question--a very ancient and grimly bitter question, that can never die out as long as the human race continues to exist on the face of the earth.... For example, an old beggar once formed part of the Jewish community at Barnow--a discharged soldier who had been crippled in the wars. No one did anything for him. The Christians would not help him because he was a Jew, and the Jews would not do it because he had eaten Christian food for so long, and because he was in the habit of swearing most blasphemously. Perhaps neither of these sins was entirely his own fault: for no army in the world has ever put its commissariat under the charge of a rabbi since the Maccabees fell asleep; and as for profane swearing, it may be as much part and parcel of an old soldier as an acorn is of an oak. But, however that may be, his co-religionists took both of these circumstances in very bad part, and provided him with nothing but daily lumps of black bread, and on Friday afternoons with seven kreutzers. Even an old beggar could not live properly in Barnow on so small an allowance, and the poor old man suffered frequently from the pangs of hunger. So when the Day of Atonement came round again--the strictest fast-day in the whole year--he found no pleasure in abstaining from food, for hunger was no unusual feeling with him. He was discovered on that day behind a pillar of the bridge with a bit of sausage in his hand. He was not ill-treated, nor was his allowance diminished: and yet fate would have been kind to him had he died in that hour: for were I to relate all that happened to the old man, I think that the hardest heart could not fail to be touched. But fate is seldom kind: he lived for many years. When he died, his rich relations put a headstone on his grave, but left it blank. But I think--I think, that the dead soldier is not nearly so much pained by this, as he was by much that they did to him when he was alive....