Reb Shloimeh stood at his window, and watched the excited groups in the street, saw how the men threw themselves about, rocked themselves, bit their beards, described half-circles with their thumbs, and he smiled. In the evening the teachers came and told him what had been said in the town, and how all held that the children were not to be allowed to go to the Talmud Torah. Reb Shloimeh was a little disturbed, but he composed himself again and thought: "Eh, they will quiet down, never mind! They won't do it to _me_!----" Entering the Talmud Torah on Sunday, he was greeted by four empty walls. Even two orphans, who had no relations or protector in the town, had not come. They had been frightened and talked at and not allowed to attend, and free meals had been secured for all of them, so that they should not starve. For the moment Reb Shloimeh lost his head. He glanced at the teachers as though ashamed in their presence, and his glance said, "What is to be done now?" Suddenly he pulled himself together. "No!" he exclaimed, "they shall not get the better of me," and he ran out of the Talmud Torah, and was gone. He ran from house to house, to the parents and relations of the children. But they all looked askance at him, and he accomplished nothing: they all kept to it--"No!" "Come, don't be silly! Send, send the children to the Talmud Torah," he begged. "You will see, you will not regret it!" And he drew a picture for them of the sort of people the children would become. But it was no use. "_We_ haven't got to manage the world," they answered him. "We have lived without all that, and our children will live as we are living now. We have no call to make Gentiles of them!" "We know, we know! People needn't come to us with stories," they would say in another house. "We don't intend to sell our souls!" was the cry in a third. "And who says I have sold mine?" Reb Shloimeh would ask sharply. "How should we know? Besides, who was talking of you?" they answered with a sweet smile. Reb Shloimeh reached home tired and depressed. The old wife had a shock on seeing him. "Dear Lord!" she exclaimed, wringing her hands. "What is the matter with you? What makes you look like that?" The teachers, who were there waiting for him, asked no questions: they had only to look at his ghastly appearance to know what had happened. Reb Shloimeh sank into his arm-chair. "Nothing," he said, looking sideways, but meaning it for the teachers. "Nothing is nothing!" and they betook themselves to consoling him. "We will find something else to do, get hold of some other children, or else wait a little--they'll ask to be taken back presently." Reb Shloimeh did not hear them. He had let his head sink on to his breast, turned his look sideways, and thoughts he could not piece together, fragments of thoughts, went round and round in the drooping head.