And from that moment he remained in the old building, and people began to tell wonderful tales of his power of perseverance--of how a tall, barefoot youth, who came walking from a far distance, had by dint of determination come to be reckoned among the great men in Israel; of how, on a winter midnight, he would open the stove doors, and study by the light of the glowing coals; of how he once forgot food and drink for three days and three nights running, while he stood over a difficult legal problem with wrinkled brows, his eyes piercing the page, his fingers stiffening round the handle of his stick, and he motionless; and when suddenly he found the solution, he gave a shout "Nu!" and came down so hard on the desk with his stick that the whole house-of-study shook. It happened just when the people were standing quite quiet, repeating the Eighteen Benedictions. Then it was told how this same lad became Rav in Mouravanke, how his genius descended to his children and children's children, till late in the generations, gathering in might with each generation in turn. They rose, these giants, one after the other, persistent investigators of the Law, with high, wrinkled foreheads, dark, bushy brows, a hard, cutting glance, sharp as steel. In those days Mouravanke was illuminated as with seven suns. The houses-of-study were filled with students; voices, young and old, rang out over the Gemorehs, sang, wept, and implored. Worried and tired-looking fathers and uncles would come into the Shools with blackened faces after the day's pitch-burning, between Afternoon and Evening Prayer, range themselves in leisurely mood by the doors and the stove, cock their ears, and listen, Jewish drivers, who convey people from one town to another, snatched a minute the first thing in the morning, and dropped in with their whips under their arms, to hear a passage in the Gemoreh expounded. And the women, who washed the linen at the pump in summer-time, beat the wet clothes to the melody of the Torah that came floating into the street through the open windows, sweet as a long-expected piece of good news. Thus Mouravanke came to be of great renown, because the wondrous power of the Mouravanke Rabbonim, the power of concentration of thought, grew from generation to generation. And in those days the old people went about with a secret whispering, that if there should arise a tenth generation of the mighty ones, a new thing, please God, would come to pass among Jews. But there was no tenth generation; the ninth of the Mouravanke Rabbonim was the last of them. He had two sons, but there was no luck in the house in his day: the sons philosophized too much, asked too many questions, took strange paths that led them far away.