ck of stubborn hair. Something
glistened on her eyelashes as she looked at the forlorn little face on the
pillow. How should Gimpy know that he was at that moment leading another
struggling soul by the hand toward the light that never dies?

"'Cause," he gulped hard, but finished manfully--"'cause I love you."

Gimpy had learned the lesson of Christmas,

"And glory shone around."

AS TOLD BY THE RABBI

Three stories have come to me out of the past for which I would make
friends in the present. The first I have from a rabbi of our own day whom
I met last winter in the far Southwest. The other two were drawn from the
wisdom of the old rabbis that is as replete with human contradiction as
the strange people of whose life it was, and is, a part. If they help us
to understand how near we live to one another, after all, it is well.
Without other comment, I shall leave each reader to make his own
application of them.

* * * * *

This was the story my friend the Arkansas rabbi told. It is from the
folk-lore of Russia:

A woman who had lain in torment a thousand years lifted her face toward
heaven and cried to the Lord to set her free, for she could endure it no
longer. And he looked down and said: "Can you remember one thing you did
for a human being without reward in your earth life?"

The woman groaned in bitter anguish, for she had lived in selfish ease;
the neighbor had been nothing to her.

"Was there not one? Think well!"

"Once--it was nothing--I gave to a starving man a carrot, and he thanked
me."

"Bring, then, the carrot. Where is it?"

"It is long since, Lord," she sobbed, "and it is lost."

"Not so; witness of the one unselfish deed of your life, it could not
perish. Go," said the Lord to an angel, "find the carrot and bring it
here."

The angel brought the carrot and held it over the bottomless pit, letting
it down till it was within reach of the woman. "Cling to it," he said. She
did as she was bidden, and found herself rising out of her misery.

Now, when the other souls in torment saw her drawn upward, they seized her
hands, her waist, her feet, her garments, and clung to them with
despairing cries, so that there rose out of the pit an ever-lengthening
chain of writhing, wailing humanity clinging to the frail root. Higher and
higher it rose till it was half-way to heaven, and still its burden grew.
The woman looked down, and fear and anger seized her--