strange hair, hair that had grown on another
person's head, and no one knows whether that other person was alive or
lying in the earth this long time, and whether she might not come any
night to one's bedside, and whine in a dead voice:

"Give me back my hair, give me back my hair!"

A frost seized the girl to the marrow, she shivered and shook.

Then she heard the squeak of scissors over her head, tore herself out of
her mother's arms, made one snatch at the scissors, flung them across
the room, and said in a scarcely human voice:

"My own hair! May God Himself punish me!"

That day the bridegroom's mother took herself off home again, together
with the sweet-cakes and the geese which she had brought for the wedding
breakfast for her own guests. She wanted to take the bridegroom as well,
but the bride's mother said: "I will not give him back to you! He
belongs to me already!"

The following Sabbath they led the bride in procession to the Shool
wearing her own hair in the face of all the town, covered only by a
large hood.

But may all the names she was called by the way find their only echo in
some uninhabited wilderness.

* * * * *

A summer evening, a few weeks after the wedding: The young man had just
returned from the Stuebel, and went to his room. The wife was already
asleep, and the soft light of the lamp fell on her pale face, showing
here and there among the wealth of silky-black hair that bathed it. Her
slender arms were flung round her head, as though she feared that
someone might come by night to shear them off while she slept. He had
come home excited and irritable: this was the fourth week of his married
life, and they had not yet called him up to the Reading of the Law, the
Chassidim pursued him, and to-day Chayyim Moisheh had blamed him in the
presence of the whole congregation, and had shamed him, because _she_,
his wife, went about in her own hair. "You're no better than a clay
image," Reb Chayyim Moisheh had told him. "What do you mean by a woman's
saying she won't? It is written: 'And he shall rule over thee.'"

And he had come home intending to go to her and say: "Woman, it is a
precept in the Torah! If you persist in wearing your own hair, I may
divorce you without returning the dowry," after which he would pack up
his things and go home. But when he saw his little wife asleep in bed,
and her pale face peeping out of the glory of her hair, he felt a great
p