paid a
visit he would not perform the "work" of lifting the knocker. Of course
he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying
it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of
Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of
phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.

One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted scrap in
mourning for the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through the streets to
synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked
three times at the door of God's house when he arrived. On the Day of
Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his
grave-clothes. On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M.
to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to
give him bending space that he hired two seats. On Tabernacles, not
having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an
attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches
through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of
sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallest _Lulav_ of
palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist
for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and
meekest man in Israel--an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival.
He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead.
Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host
of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar.
Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary "Sons of the Covenant"
were mere heathens. He was a man of prodigious distorted mental
activity. He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew
literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and,
still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently
on any subject outside religion. His letters to the press on
specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved,
incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with
Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the
most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth
and death of every Rabbi mentioned.

No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the
bitter end. They were written in good English