ey
exclaimed. "Aren't you sometimes in the room with them?"

"Look here, good people, what's the use of coming to me?" the maid would
cry. "How can I know, sitting in the kitchen, what they are about? When
I bring in the tea, I see them talking, and I go!"

"Dull beast!" they would reply. Then they left her, and betook
themselves to the grandchildren, who knew nothing, either.

"They have tea," was their answer to the question, "What does
grandfather do with the teacher?"

"But what do they talk about, sillies?"

"We haven't heard!" the children answered gravely.

They tried the old lady.

"Is it my business?" she answered.

They tried to go in to Reb Shloimeh's house, on the pretext of some
business or other, but that didn't succeed, either. At last, a few near
and dear friends asked Reb Shloimeh himself.

"How people do gossip!" he answered.

"Well, what is it?"

"We just sit and talk!"

There it remained. The matter was discussed all over the town. Of
course, nobody was satisfied. But he pacified them little by little.

The apostate teacher must turn hot and cold with him!

They imagined that they were occupied with research, and that Reb
Shloimeh was opening the teacher's eyes for him--and they were pacified.
When Reb Shloimeh suddenly fell on melancholy, it never came into
anyone's head that there might be a connection between this and the
conversations. The old lady settled that it was a question of the
stomach, which had always troubled him, and that perhaps he had taken a
chill. At his age such things were frequent. "But how is one to know,
when he won't speak?" she lamented, and wondered which would be best,
cod-liver oil or dried raspberries.

Every one else said that he was already in fear of death, and they
pitied him greatly. "That is a sickness which no doctor can cure,"
people said, and shook their heads with sorrowful compassion. They
talked to him by the hour, and tried to prevent him from being alone
with his thoughts, but it was all no good; he only grew more depressed,
and would often not speak at all.

"Such a man, too, what a pity!" they said, and sighed. "He's pining
away--given up to the contemplation of death."

"And if you come to think, why should he fear death?" they wondered. "If
_he_ fears it, what about us? Och! och! och! Have we so much to show in
the next world?" And Reb Shloimeh had a lot to show. Jews would have
been glad of a tenth part of his world-to-come, and