I pushed a coin into his hand, and he went away. Meanwhile the news had spread, my intention to purchase earth of Palestine had been noised abroad, and the little town echoed with my name. In the streets, lanes, and market-place, the talk was all of me and of how "there is no putting a final value on a Jewish soul: one thought he was one of _them_, and now he wants to buy earth of Palestine!" Many of those who met me looked at me askance, "The same and _not_ the same!" In the synagogue they gave me the best turn at the Reading of the Law; Jews in shoes and socks wished me "a good Sabbath" with great heartiness, and a friendly smile: "Eh-eh-eh! We understand--you are a deep one--you are one of us after all." In short, they surrounded me, and nearly carried me on their shoulders, so that I really became something of a celebrity. Yuedel, the "living orphan," worked the hardest. Yuedel is already a man in years, but everyone calls him the "orphan" on account of what befell him on a time. His history is very long and interesting, I will tell it you in brief. He has a very distinguished father and a very noble mother, and he is an only child, of a very frolicsome disposition, on account of which his father and his mother frequently disagreed; the father used to punish him and beat him, but the boy hid with his mother. In a word, it came to this, that his father gave him into the hands of strangers, to be educated and put into shape. The mother could not do without him, and fell sick of grief; she became a wreck. Her beautiful house was burnt long ago through the boy's doing: one day, when a child, he played with fire, and there was a conflagration, and the neighbors came and built on the site of her palace, and she, the invalid, lies neglected in a corner. The father, who has left the house, often wished to rejoin her, but by no manner of means can they live together without the son, and so the cast-off child became a "living orphan"; he roams about in the wide world, comes to a place, and when he has stayed there a little while, they drive him out, because wherever he comes, he stirs up a commotion. As is the way with all orphans, he has many fathers, and everyone directs him, hits him, lectures him; he is always in the way, blamed for everything, it's always his fault, so that he has got into the habit of cowering and shrinking at the mere sight of a stick. Wandering about as he does, he has copied the manners and customs of strange people, in every place where he has been; his very character is hardly his own. His father has tried both to threaten and to persuade him into coming back, saying they would then all live together as before, but Yuedel has got to like living from home, he enjoys the scrapes he gets into, and even the blows they earn for him. No matter how people knock him about, pull his hair, and draw his blood, the moment they want him to make friendly advances, there he is again, alert and smiling, turns the world