hated my own person, when, in our play of a Christian
funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried
the hideous cross.

Perhaps I have established that I was more Jew than Gentile, though I
can still prove that I was none the less a fraud. For instance, I
remember how once, on the eve of the Ninth of Ab--the anniversary of
the fall of the Temple--I was looking on at the lamentations of the
women. A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only
good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel
destruction. Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby
clothes, and dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their
hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell and
they were in the very dust and ashes of the ruin, the women looked to
me enviously wretched and pious. I joined the circle in the
candlelight. I wrung my hands, I moaned; but I was always slow of
tears--I could not weep. But I wanted to look like the others. So I
streaked my cheeks with the only moisture at hand.

Alas for my pious ambition! alas for the noble lament of the women!
Somebody looked up and caught me in the act of manufacturing tears. I
grinned, and she giggled. Another woman looked up. I grinned, and they
giggled. Demoralization swept around the circle. Honest laughter
snuffed out artificial grief. My mother at last looked up, with red
and astonished eyes, and I was banished from the feast of tears.

I returned promptly to my playmates in the street, who were amusing
themselves, according to the custom on that sad anniversary, by
pelting each other with burrs. Here I was distinguished, more than I
had been among my elders. My hair being curly, it caught a generous
number of burrs, so that I fairly bristled with these emblems of
mortification and woe.

Not long after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief I
discovered by accident that I was not the only doubter in Polotzk. One
Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark
into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles
sputter and go out, one by one,--it was late,--but the lamp hanging
from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed. The
lamp would go out before morning if there was little oil; or else it
would burn till Natasha, the Gentile chorewoman, came in the morning
to put it out, and remove the candlesticks from the table, and unseal
the oven, and do the do