Neither were they ordinary men, these three, but the chief Jews of the community: the Rabbi and his two Dayonim. The townsfolk looked up to them as if they had been angels, and certainly held them to be saints. And now, as I write these words, I remember how difficult it was for me to understand, and how I sometimes used to think the Rabbi and his Dayonim had done wrong. But even then I felt that they were doing a tremendous thing, that they were holy men with holy instincts, and that it was not easy for them to act thus. Who knows how hard they fought with themselves, who knows how they suffered, and what they endured? And even if I live many years and grow old, I shall never forget the day and the men, and what was done on it, for they were no ordinary men, but great heroes. Those were bitter times, such as had not been for long, and such as will not soon return. A great calamity had descended on us from Heaven, and had spread abroad among the towns and over the country: the cholera had broken out. The calamity had reached us from a distant land, and entered our little town, and clutched at young and old. By day and by night men died like flies, and those who were left hung between life and death. Who can number the dead who were buried in those days! Who knows the names of the corpses which lay about in heaps in the streets! In the Jewish street the plague made great ravages: there was not a house where there lay not one dead--not a family in which the calamity had not broken out. In the house where we lived, on the second floor, nine people died in one day. In the basement there died a mother and four children, and in the house opposite we heard wild cries one whole night through, and in the morning we became aware that there was no one left in it alive. The grave-diggers worked early and late, and the corpses lay about in the streets like dung. They stuck one to the other like clay, and one walked over dead bodies. The summer broke up, and there came the Solemn Days, and then the most dreadful day of all--the Day of Atonement. I shall remember that day as long as I live. The Eve of the Day of Atonement--the reciting of Kol Nidre! At the desk before the ark there stands, not as usual the precentor and two householders, but the Rabbi and his two Dayonim. The candles are burning all round, and there is a whispering of the flames as they grow taller and taller. The people stand at their reading-desks with grave faces, and draw on the robes and prayer-scarfs, the Spanish hoods and silver girdles; and their shadows sway this way and that along the walls, and might be the ghosts of the dead who died to-day and yesterday and the day before yesterday. Evidently they could not rest in their graves, and have also come into the Shool. Hush!... the Rabbi has begun to say something, and the Dayonim, too, and a groan rises from the congregation.