the scholars and
repaid her labors with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to
myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the
things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and
that piety, of course, was the fruit of sacred learning. And yet my
father had deliberately violated the Sabbath.

His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The
two sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and their motives were
different. I was a child, a girl at that, not yet of the age of moral
responsibility. He was a man full grown, passing for one of God's
elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute to his
scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret
experiment, that it was not sinful to carry a burden on the Sabbath
day. If God did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of
my youth or perhaps it was because of my motive.

According to my elders, my father, by turning out the lamp, committed
the sin of Sabbath-breaking. What did my father intend? I could not
suppose that his purpose was similar to mine. Surely he, who had lived
so long and studied so deeply, had by this time resolved all his
doubts. Surely God had instructed _him_. I could not believe that he
did wrong knowingly, so I came to the conclusion that he did not hold
it a sin to touch a lighted lamp on Sabbath. Then why was he so secret
in his action? That, too, became clear to me. I myself had
instinctively adopted secret methods in all my little investigations,
and had kept the results to myself. The way in which my questions were
received had taught me much. I had a dim, inarticulate understanding
of the horror and indignation which my father would excite if he,
supposedly a man of piety, should publish the heretical opinion that
it was not wrong to handle fire on the Sabbath. To see what remorse my
mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed
in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never
be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the thousand minutiae of
ancient Jewish practice. That which had been taught them as the truth
by their fathers and mothers was the whole truth to my good friends
and neighbors--that and nothing else. If there were any people in
Polotzk who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my
father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance
with them. But i