All the remaining inhabitants, big and little, men and women, gathered in the court of the Shool, and stood with pale faces and beating hearts to see what would happen. The eyes of the young bachelors rolled uneasily, the girls had their faces on one another's shoulders, and sobbed. Breindel, agile as a cat, climbed on to the highest millstone, and proclaimed in a voice of thunder: "Seeing that such and such a thing has happened, a great scandal such as is not to be hid, and such as we do not wish to hide, all we women have decided to excommunicate----" Such a tumult arose that for a minute or two Breindel could not be heard, but it was not long before everyone knew who and what was meant. "We also demand that neither he nor his nearest friends shall be called to the Reading of the Law; that people shall have nothing to do with them till after the wedding!" "Nothing to do with them! Nothing to do with them!" shook the air. "That people shall not lend to them nor borrow of them, shall not come within their four ells!" continued the voice from the millstone. "And _she_ shall be shut up till her time comes, so that no one shall see her. Then we will take her to the burial-ground, and the child shall be born in the burial-ground. The wedding shall take place by day, and without musicians--" "Without musicians!" "Without musicians!" 'Without musicians!" "Serve her right!" "She deserves worse!" A hundred voices were continually interrupting the speaker, and more women were climbing onto the millstones, and shouting the same things. "On the wedding-day there will be great black candles burning throughout the whole town, and when the bride is seated at the top of the marriage-hall, with her hair flowing loose about her, all the girls shall surround her, and the Badchen shall tell her, 'This is the way we treat one who has not held to her Jewishness, and has blackened all our faces----'" "Yes!" "Yes!" "So it is!" "The apostates!" The last words struck the hearers' hearts like poisoned arrows. A deathly pallor, born of unrealized terror at the suggested idea, overspread all their faces, their feelings were in a tumult of shame and suffering. They thirsted and longed after their former life, the time before the calamity disturbed their peace. Weary and wounded in spirit, with startled looks, throbbing pulses, and dilated pupils, and with no more than a faint hope that all might yet be well, they slowly broke the stillness, and departed to their homes. LOeB SCHAPIRO Born, about 1880, in the Government of Kieff, Little Russia; came to Chicago in 1906, and to New York for a short time in 1907-1908; now (1912) in business in Switzerland; contributor to Die Zukunft, New York; collected works, Novellen, 1 vol., Warsaw, 1910. IF IT WAS A DREAM Yes, it was a terrible dream! But when one is only nine years old, one soon forgets, and Meyerl was nine a few weeks before it came to pass.