"What do you mean by poems? What is the good of them?" He felt that he was growing weak again, and tried to stiffen himself morally. "What is the good of them, heretic, tell me!" "They're just meant to read, Tatishe!" "What do you mean by 'read'? A Jeroboam son of Nebat, that's what you want to be, is it? A Jeroboam son of Nebat, to lead others into heresy! No! I won't have it! On no account will I have it!" The sun had begun to disappear; it was full time to go home; but the Rav did not know what to do with the folio. He was afraid to leave it in the field, lest Sholem or another should pick it up later, so he got up and began to recite the Afternoon Prayer. Sholem remained standing in his place, and tried to think of nothing and to do nothing. The old man finished "Sacrifices," tucked the folio into his girdle, and, without moving a step, looked at Sholem, who did not move either. "Say the Afternoon Prayer, Shegetz!" commanded the old man. Sholem began to move his lips. And the Rav felt, as he went on with the prayer, that this anger was cooling down. Before he came to the Eighteen Benedictions, he gave another look at his son, and it seemed madness to think of him as a heretic, to think that Sholem ought by rights to be thrown into a ditch and stoned to death. Sholem, for his part, was conscious for the first time of his father's will: for the first time in his life, he not only loved his father, but was in very truth subject to him. The flaming red sun dropt quietly down behind the horizon just before the old man broke down with emotion over "Thou art One," and took the sky and the earth to witness that God is One and His Name is One, and His people Israel one nation on the earth, to whom He gave the Sabbath for a rest and an inheritance. The Rav wept and swallowed his tears, and his eyes were closed. Sholem, on the other hand, could not take his eye off the manuscript that stuck out of his father's girdle, and it was all he could do not to snatch it and run away. They said nothing on the way home in the dark, they might have been coming from a funeral. But Sholem's heart beat fast, for he knew his father would throw the manuscript into the fire, where it would be burnt, and when they came to the door of their house, he stopped his father, and said in a voice eloquent of tears: "Give it me back, Tatishe, please give it me back!" And the Rav gave it him back without looking him in the face, and said: "Look here, only don't tell Mother! She is ill, she mustn't be upset. She is ill, not of you be it spoken!" MEYER BLINKIN Born, 1879, in a village near Pereyaslav, Government of Poltava, Little Russia, of Hasidic parentage; educated in Kieff, where he acquired the trade of carpenter in order to win the right of residence; studied medicine; began to write in 1906; came to New York in 1908; writer of stories to the number of about fifty, which have been published in various periodicals; wrote also Der Sod, and Dr. Makower.