hat smoothed the soft
leather on the last took a tenderer, lingering touch as he glanced
toward the stool where the child had sat watching him work till his
eyes grew small. Brave little Ben, almost a baby yet, but so patient,
so wise, and so strong!

The deep breathing of the sleeping children reached him from their
crib. He smiled and listened, with the half-finished slipper in his
hand. As he sat thus, a great drowsiness came upon him. He nodded
once, twice; his hands sank into his lap, his head fell forward upon
his chest. In the silence of the morning he slept, worn out with utter
weariness.

He awoke with a guilty start to find the first rays of the dawn
struggling through his window, and his task yet undone. With desperate
energy he seized the unfinished slipper to resume his work. His
unsteady hand upset the little lamp by his side, upon which his
burnishing-iron was heating. The oil blazed up on the floor and ran
toward the nearly finished pile of work. The cloth on the table caught
fire. In a fever of terror and excitement, the slipper-maker caught it
in his hands, wrung it, and tore at it to smother the flames. His
hands were burned, but what of that? The slippers, the slippers! If
they were burned, it was ruin. There would be no Yom Kippur, no feast
of Atonement, no fast--rather, no end of it; starvation for him and
his.

He beat the fire with his hands and trampled it with his feet as it
burned and spread on the floor. His hair and his beard caught fire:
With a despairing shriek he gave it up and fell before the precious
slippers, barring, the way of the flames to them with his body.

The shriek woke his wife. She sprang out of bed, snatched up a
blanket, and threw it upon the fire. It went out, was smothered under
the blanket. The slipper-maker sat up, panting and grateful. His Yom
Kippur was saved.

The tenement awoke to hear of the fire in the morning, when all Jew
town was stirring with preparations for the feast. The slipper-maker's
wife was setting the house to rights for the holiday then. Two
half-naked children played about her knees, asking eager questions
about it. Asked if her husband had often to work so hard, and what he
made by it, she shrugged her shoulders and said, "The rent and a
crust."

And yet all this labor and effort to enable him to fast one day
according to the old dispensation, when all the rest of the days he
fasted according to the new!

DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY