The brief tale I am telling you happened in the days before Kamenivke had joined itself on, by means of the long, tall, and beautiful bridge, to the great high hill that has stood facing it from everlasting, thickly wooded, and watered by quantities of clear, crystal streams, which babble one to another day and night, and whisper with their running tongues of most important things. So long as the bridge had not been flung from one of the giant rocks to the other rock, the Kamenivke people had not been able to procure the good, wholesome water of the wild hill, and had to content themselves with the thick, impure water of the river Smotritch, which has flowed forever round the eminence on which Kamenivke is built. But man, and especially the Jew, gets used to anything, and the Kamenivke people, who are nearly all Grandfather Abraham's grandchildren, had drunk Smotritch water all their lives, and were conscious of no grievance. But the lot of the Kamenivke water-carriers was hard and bitter. Kamenivke stands high, almost in the air, and the river Smotritch runs deep down in the valley. In summer, when the ground is dry, it was bearable, for then the Kamenivke water-carrier was merely bathed in sweat as he toiled up the hill, and the Jewish breadwinner has been used to that for ages. But in winter, when the snow was deep and the frost tremendous, when the steep Skossny hill with its clay soil was covered with ice like a hill of glass! Or when the great rains were pouring down, and the town and especially the clay hill are confounded with the deep, thick mud! Our Bertzi Wasserfuehrer was more alive to the fascinations of this Parnosseh than any other water-carrier. He was, as though in his own despite, a pious Jew and a great man of his word, and he had to carry water for almost all the well-to-do householders. True, that in face of all his good luck he was one of the poorest Jews in the Poor People's Street, only---- V Lord of the World, may there never again be such a winter as there was then! Not the oldest man there could recall one like it. The snow came down in drifts, and never stopped. One could and might have sworn on a scroll of the Law, that the great Jewish God was angry with the Kamenivke Jews, and had commanded His angels to shovel down on Kamenivke all the snow that had lain by in all the seven heavens since the sixth day of creation, so that the sinful town might be a ruin and a desolation. And the terrible, fiery frosts! Frozen people were brought into the town nearly every day. Oi, Jews, how Bertzi Wasserfuehrer struggled, what a time he had of it! Enemies of Zion, it was nearly the death of him! And suddenly the snow began to stop falling, all at once, and then things were worse than ever--there was a sea of water, an ocean of mud. And Passover coming on with great strides!