se we should be accused of trying to
convert them, and that would be the end of us.

Oh, if they could only understand! Vanka caught me on the street one
day, and pulled my hair, and called me names; and all of a sudden I
asked myself _why_--_why?_--a thing I had stopped asking years before.
I was so angry that I could have punished him; for one moment I was
not afraid to hit back. But this _why_--_why?_ broke out in my heart,
and I forgot to revenge myself. It was so wonderful--Well, there were
no words in my head to say it, but it meant that Vanka abused me only
because _he did not understand_. If he could feel with my heart, if he
could be a little Jewish boy for one day, I thought, he would know--he
would know. If he could understand about David the Substitute, now,
without being told, as I understood. If he could wake in my place on
Sabbath morning, and feel his heart break in him with a strange pain,
because a Jew had dishonored the law of Moses, and God was bending
down to pardon him. Oh, why could I not make Vanka understand? I was
so sorry that my heart hurt me, worse than Vanka's blows. My anger and
my courage were gone. Vanka was throwing stones at me now from his
mother's doorway, and I continued on my errand, but I did not hurry.
The thing that hurt me most I could not run away from.

There was one thing the Gentiles always understood, and that was
money. They would take any kind of bribe at any time. Peace cost so
much a year in Polotzk. If you did not keep on good terms with your
Gentile neighbors, they had a hundred ways of molesting you. If you
chased their pigs when they came rooting up your garden, or objected
to their children maltreating your children, they might complain
against you to the police, stuffing their case with false accusations
and false witnesses. If you had not made friends with the police, the
case might go to court; and there you lost before the trial was
called, unless the judge had reason to befriend you. The cheapest way
to live in Polotzk was to pay as you went along. Even a little girl
understood that, in Polotzk.

Perhaps your parents were in business,--usually they were, as almost
everybody kept store,--and you heard a great deal about the chief of
police, and excise officers, and other agents of the Czar. Between the
Czar whom you had never seen, and the policeman whom you knew too
well, you pictured to yourself a long row of officials of all sorts,
all with their palms s