on as my mother could be moved, he took us all out to the mill,
about three versts out of town, on the Polota. We had a pleasant
cottage there, with the miller's red-headed, freckled family for our
only neighbors. If our rooms were barer than they used to be, the sun
shone in at all the windows; and as the leaves on the trees grew
denser and darker, my mother grew stronger on her feet, and laughter
returned to our house as the song bird to the grove.

We children had a very happy summer. We had never lived in the country
before, and we liked the change. It was endless fun to explore the
mill; to squeeze into forbidden places, and be pulled out by the angry
miller; to tyrannize over the mill hands, and be worshipped by them in
return; to go boating on the river, and discover unvisited nooks, and
search the woods and fields for kitchen herbs, and get lost, and be
found, a hundred times a week. And what an adventure it was to walk
the three versts into town, leaving a trail of perfume from the
wild-flower posies we carried to our city friends!

But these things did not last. The mill changed hands, and the new
owner put a protege of his own in my father's place. So, after a short
breathing spell, we were driven back into the swamp of growing poverty
and trouble.

The next year or so my father spent in a restless and fruitless search
for a permanent position. My mother had another serious illness, and
his own health remained precarious. What he earned did not more than
half pay the bills in the end, though we were living very humbly now.
Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.

Just at this time occurred one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements
whereby government officials were wont to clear the forbidden cities
of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law,
they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the
Pale, on payment of enormous bribes and at the cost of nameless risks
and indignities.

It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled
the Jewish world with the familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of
Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice
was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike
next? The Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their
possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate
flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale