r all. The significance
of his mother's words becoming suddenly clear to Dan, he asked himself
if it were not yet within the width of a finger that Joseph would tire
of trade and retire to Jerusalem and expound the law and the traditions
in the Temple. His vocation, Dan was of opinion, could not yet be
predicted with any certainty: he might go either way--to trade or to
religious learning--and in the midst of these meditations on his son's
character Dan remembered that some friends had come to see Joseph at the
counting-house yesterday. Joseph had taken them out into the yard and
they had talked together, but it was not of the export of salt fish they
had spoken, but of the observances of the Sabbath. Dan had listened, pen
in hand, his thoughts suspended, and had heard them devote many minutes
to the question whether a man should dip himself in the nearest brook if
he had accidentally touched a pig. He had heard them discuss at length
the grace that should be used before eating fruit from a tree, and
whether it were necessary to say three graces after eating three kinds
of fruit at one meal. He had heard one ask if a sheep that had been
killed with a Greek knife could be eaten, and he had heard Joseph ask
him if he knew the sheep had been killed with a Greek knife and the man
confess that he had not made inquiry. If he had known--

Dan did not hear the end of the sentence, but imagined that it ended in
a gesture of abhorrence. In his day religion was limited to the law of
Moses, a skein well combed out, but the Scribes in Jerusalem had knotted
and twisted the skein. He had heard Joseph maintain, and stiffly too,
that an egg laid on the day after the Sabbath could not be eaten,
because it had been prepared by the hen on the Sabbath. But one can't
always be watching hens, he said to himself, and the discussion of such
points seeming to him unmanly, he drew back the window-curtain and fell
into admiration of his son's slim loins and great shoulders. Joseph was
laughing with his companions at that moment and his teeth glistened,
every one white and shapely. Why do such discussions interest him? Dan
asked, for his eyes are soft as flowers; and he envied the woman that
Joseph would resort unto in the night. But very often men like Joseph
did not marry, and a new disquietude arose in his mind: he wanted
children, grandchildren. In a few years Joseph should begin to look
round.... Meanwhile it might be well to tell him that men