ould not
affect nor pleasure lure from the course of strict duty.

When at the end of a year Recha presented him with a little girl-baby,
which they called Kathinka, he was the happiest man on the face of the
earth.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE CHOLERA AND ITS VICTIMS.

A new danger threatened our friends. Scarcely had the fanatical Russian
given the Jews a brief respite from persecution, when Nature seized the
rod and wielded it with relentless hand, smiting Jew and gentile, the
pious and the ungodly, with equal severity. The cholera had broken out
in Central Russia and its devastations were terrible beyond description.
The country from Kief to Odessa was as one vast charnel-house. As has
always been the case during epidemics, the Jews suffered less from the
ravages of the disease than did their gentile neighbors. The strict
dietary laws which excluded everything not absolutely fresh and clean,
the frequent ablutions which the religious rites demanded of the Jews
and their freedom from all enervating excesses, bore excellent results
in a diminished mortality. Nevertheless, many a victim was hurried to an
untimely grave, many a family sat in sackcloth and ashes for a departed
member.

Amid the general consternation caused by the rapid spread of the plague,
the _feldshers_ were unceremoniously relegated to the background. Their
surgery was practically useless and their drugs proved powerless to
stay the disease. The _snakharkas_, on the other hand, prospered
greatly. Superstition flourished; prayers, sacrifices, incantations,
magical rites, exorcisms, were invoked to allay the evil. The _moujiks_
called frantically upon the saints for assistance, and then deliberately
frustrated any relief these might have afforded by committing frightful
excesses. Many a saint fell into temporary disfavor by his apparent
indifference to the sufferings of his devotees.

The priests invented new ceremonials and each village had its own
peculiar method of appeasing divine wrath. In Kief, the disease had
taken a particularly virulent form. The filthy Dnieper, contaminated by
the reeking sewerage of the city, was in a great measure to blame for
the rapid spread of the disorder, but to have advanced such a theory
would have been useless; the ignorant inhabitants ascribed the scourge
to any source but the true one. At one time the _feldshers_ were accused
of having propagated the plague for their own pecuniary benefit, and the
excited po