er he entered the
army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honors. He
remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was
discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home,
without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life
wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family; hiding
the scars of torture under his rags, begging his way from door to
door. If he were one who had broken down under the cruel torments, and
allowed himself to be baptized, for the sake of a respite, the Church
never let him go again, no matter how loudly he protested that he was
still a Jew. If he was caught practicing Jewish rites, he was
subjected to the severest punishment.

My father knew of one who was taken as a small boy, who never yielded
to the priests under the most hideous tortures. As he was a very
bright boy, the priests were particularly eager to convert him. They
tried him with bribes that would appeal to his ambition. They promised
to make a great man of him--a general, a noble. The boy turned away
and said his prayers. Then they tortured him, and threw him into a
cell; and when he lay asleep from exhaustion, the priest came and
baptized him. When he awoke, they told him he was a Christian, and
brought him the crucifix to kiss. He protested, threw the crucifix
from him, but they held him to it that he was a baptized Jew, and
belonged to the Church; and the rest of his life he spent between the
prison and the hospital, always clinging to his faith, saying the
Hebrew prayers in defiance of his tormentors, and paying for it with
his flesh.

There were men in Polotzk whose faces made you old in a minute. They
had served Nicholas I, and come back unbaptized. The white church in
the square--how did it look to them? I knew. I cursed the church in my
heart every time I had to pass it; and I was afraid--afraid.

On market days, when the peasants came to church, and the bells kept
ringing by the hour, my heart was heavy in me, and I could find no
rest. Even in my father's house I did not feel safe. The church bell
boomed over the roofs of the houses, calling, calling, calling. I
closed my eyes, and saw the people passing into the church: peasant
women with bright embroidered aprons and glass beads; barefoot little
girls with colored kerchiefs on their heads; boys with caps pulled too
far down over their flaxen hair; rough men with plaited bast sandals,
and a rope ar