if you
have to fall back on this sort of thing. I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll send you _Our Own_."

"Oh, will you, Benjy? That is good of you," she said joyfully, and was
kissing him when Solomon and Isaac came romping in and woke up the
grandmother.

"How are you, Solomon?" said Benjamin. "How are you, my little man," he
added, patting Isaac on his curly head. Solomon was overawed for a
moment. Then he said, "Hullo, Benjy, have you got any spare buttons?"

But Isaac was utterly ignorant who the stranger could be and hung back
with his finger in his mouth.

"That's your brother Benjamin, Ikey," said Solomon.

"Don't want no more brovers," said Ikey.

"Oh, but I was here before you," said Benjamin laughing.

"Does oor birfday come before mine, then?"

"Yes, if I remember."

Isaac looked tauntingly at the door. "See!" he cried to the absent
Sarah. Then turning graciously to Benjamin he said, "I thant kiss oo,
but I'll lat oo teep in my new bed."

"But you _must_ kiss him," said Esther, and saw that he did it before
she left the room to fetch little Sarah from Mrs. Simons.

When she came back Solomon was letting Benjamin inspect his Plevna
peep-show without charge and Moses Ansell was back, too. His eyes were
red with weeping, but that was on account of the _Maggid_. His nose was
blue with the chill of the cemetery.

"He was a great man." he was saying to the grandmother. "He could
lecture for four hours together on any text and he would always manage
to get back to the text before the end. Such exegetics, such homiletics!
He was greater than the Emperor of Russia. Woe! Woe!"

"Woe! Woe!" echoed the grandmother. "If women were allowed to go to
funerals, I would gladly have, followed him. Why did he come to England?
In Poland he would still have been alive. And why did I come to England?
Woe! Woe'"

Her head dropped back on the pillow and her sighs passed gently into
snores. Moses turned again to his eldest born, feeling that he was
secondary in importance only to the _Maggid_, and proud at heart of his
genteel English appearance.

"Well, you'll soon be _Bar-mitzvah_, Benjamin." he said, with clumsy
geniality blent with respect, as he patted his boy's cheeks with his
discolored fingers.

Benjamin caught the last two words and nodded his head.

"And then you'll be coming back to us. I suppose they will apprentice
you to something."

"What does he say, Esther?" asked Benjamin, impatiently.

Esthe