fellow was asleep, and
snoring the snore of the just.

On Sabbath morning almost everybody went to synagogue, and those who
did not, read their prayers and devotions at home. Dinner, at midday,
was a pleasant and leisurely meal in our house. Between courses my
father led us in singing our favorite songs, sometimes Hebrew,
sometimes Yiddish, sometimes Russian, or some of the songs without
words for which the Hasidim were famous. In the afternoon we went
visiting, or else we took long walks out of town, where the fields
sprouted and the orchards waited to bloom. If we stayed at home, we
were not without company. Neighbors dropped in for a glass of tea.
Uncles and cousins came, and perhaps my brother's rebbe, to examine
his pupil in the hearing of the family. And wherever we spent the day,
the talk was pleasant, the faces were cheerful, and the joy of Sabbath
pervaded everything.

The festivals were observed with all due pomp and circumstance in our
house. Passover was beautiful with shining new things all through the
house; _Purim_ was gay with feasting and presents and the jolly
mummers; _Succoth_ was a poem lived in a green arbor; New-Year
thrilled our hearts with its symbols and promises; and the Day of
Atonement moved even the laughing children to a longing for
consecration. The year, in our pious house, was an endless song in
many cantos of joy, lamentation, aspiration, and rhapsody.

We children, while we regretted the passing of a festival, found
plenty to content us in the common days of the week. We had
everything we needed, and almost everything we wanted. We were
welcomed everywhere, petted and praised, abroad as well as at home. I
suppose no little girls with whom we played had a more comfortable
sense of being well-off than Fetchke and I. "Raphael the Russian's
grandchildren" people called us, as if referring to the quarterings in
our shield. It was very pleasant to wear fine clothes, to have kopecks
to spend at the fruit stalls, and to be pointed at admiringly. Some of
the little girls we went with were richer than we, but after all one's
mother can wear only one pair of earrings at a time, and our mother
had beautiful gold ones that hung down on her neck.

As we grew older, my parents gave us more than physical comfort and
social standing to rejoice in. They gave us, or set out to give us,
education, which was less common than gold earrings in Polotzk. For
the ideal of a modern education was the pricel