There, in Volhynia, on Friday evenings, the rich Jewish householder of the district walks to and fro leisurely in his brightly lit room. In all likelihood, he is a short, plump, hairy man, with a broad, fair beard, a gathered silk sash round his substantial figure, a cheery singsong "Sholom-Alechem" on his mincing, "chiriky" tongue, and a merry crack of the thumb. The Lithuanian guest, teacher or preacher, the shrunk and shrivelled stranger with the piercing black eyes, sits in a corner, merely moving his lips and gazing at the floor--perhaps because he feels ill at ease in the bright, nicely-furnished room; perhaps because he is thinking of his distant home, of his wife and children and his marriageable daughter; and perhaps because it has suddenly all become oddly dear to him, his poor, forsaken native place, with its moiling, poverty-struck Jews, whose week is spent pitch-burning in the forest; with its old, warm houses-of-study; with its celebrated giants of the Torah, bending with a candle in their hand over the great hoary Gemorehs. And here, at table, between the tasty stuffed fish and the soup, with the rich Volhynian "stuffed monkeys," the brusque, tongue-tied guest is suddenly unable to contain himself, and overflows with talk about his corner in Lithuania. "Whether we have our Rabbis at home?! N-nu!!" And thereupon he holds forth grandiloquently, with an ardor and incisiveness born of the love and the longing at his heart. The piercing black eyes shoot sparks, as the guest tells of the great men of Mouravanke, with their fiery intellects, their iron perseverance, who sit over their books by day and by night. From time to time they take an hour and a half's doze, falling with their head onto their fists, their beards sweeping the Gemoreh, the big candle keeping watch overhead and waking them once more to the study of the Torah. At dawn, when the people begin to come in for the Morning Prayer, they walk round them on tiptoe, giving them their four-ells' distance, and avoid meeting their look, which is apt to be sharp and burning. "That is the way we study in Lithuania!" The stout, hairy householder, good-natured and credulous, listens attentively to the wonderful tales, loosens the sash over his pelisse in leisurely fashion, unbuttons his waistcoat across his generous waist, blows out his cheeks, and sways his head from side to side, because--one may believe anything of the Lithuanians!