n-load of hay," that "Reb
Eliezer ben Charsum had a thousand towns on land and a thousand ships on
the sea." Ha, that was a fortune! He must have been nearly as rich as
Rothschild (they knew about Rothschild even in Pumpian!). "Yes, he was a
rich Tano and no mistake!" he reflected, and was straightway sunk in the
consideration of the subject of rich and poor.

He knew from the holy books that to be rich is a pure misfortune. King
Solomon, who was certainly a great sage, prayed to God: Resh wo-Osher
al-titten li!--"Give me neither poverty nor _riches_!" He said that
"riches are stored to the hurt of their owner," and in the holy Gemoreh
there is a passage which says, "Poverty becomes a Jew as scarlet reins
become a white horse," and once a sage had been in Heaven for a short
time and had come back again, and he said that he had seen poor people
there occupying the principal seats in the Garden of Eden, and the rich
pushed right away, back into a corner by the door. And as for the books
of exhortation, there are things written that make you shudder in every
limb. The punishments meted out to the rich by God in that world, the
world of truth, are no joke. For what bit of merit they have, God
rewards them in _this_ poor world, the world of vanity, while yonder, in
the world of truth, they arrive stript and naked, without so much as a
taste of Kingdom-come!

"Consequently, the question is," thought Reb Nochumtzi, "why should
they, the rich, want to keep this misfortune? Of what use is this
misfortune to them? Who so mad as to take such a piece of misfortune
into his house and keep it there? How can anyone take the world-to-come
in both hands and lose it for the sake of such vanities?"

He thought and thought, and thought it over again:

"What is a poor creature to do when God sends him the misfortune of
riches? He would certainly wish to get rid of them, only who would take
his misfortune to please him? Who would free another from a curse and
take it upon himself?

"But, after all ... ha?" the Evil Spirit muttered inside him.

"What a fool you are!" thought Reb Nochumtzi again. "If" (and he
described a half-circle downward in the air with his thumb), "if
troubles come to us, such as an illness (may the Merciful protect us!),
or some other misfortune of the kind, it is expressly stated in the
Sacred Writings that it is an expiation for sin, a torment sent into the
world, so that we may be purified by it, and made fit to