promenaders in the square,
and not pausing till the merry music of the big shining horns had died
away behind him. And even then he walked quickly, as if pursued by the
strange vast world into which he had penetrated for the first time.
And suddenly he found himself in a blind alley, and knew that he could
not find his way back to the Ghetto. He was about to ask of a woman
who looked kind, when he remembered, with a chill down his spine, that
he was not wearing a yellow O, as a man should, and that, as he was
now a "Son of the Commandment," the Venetians would consider him a
man. For one forlorn moment it seemed to him that he would never find
himself back in the Ghetto again; but at last he bethought himself of
asking for the Cannaregio, and so gradually, cold at heart and
trembling, he reached the familiar iron gate and slipped in. All was
as before in the Ghetto. The same sacred hush in court and square,
accentuated by the rumble of prayer from the synagogues, the gathering
dusk lending a touch of added solemnity.

"Well, have you eaten?" asked the father. The boy nodded "Yes." A
faint flush of exultation leapt into his pale cheek. He would see the
fast out after all. The men were beating their breasts at the
confession of sin. "For the sin we have committed by lying," chimed in
the boy. But although in his attention to the wailful melody of the
words he scarcely noticed the meaning, something of the old passion
and fervor had gone out of his voice. Twilight fell; the shadows
deepened, the white figures, wailing and weeping in their
grave-clothes, grew mystic; the time for sealing the Books of
Judgment drew nigh. The figures threw themselves forward full length,
their foreheads to the floor, proclaiming passionately again and
again, "The Lord He is God; the Lord He is God!" It was the hour in
which the boy's sense of overbrooding awe had always been tensest. But
he could not shake off the thought of the gay piazza and the wonderful
church where other people prayed other prayers. For something larger
had come into his life, a sense of a vaster universe without, and its
spaciousness and strangeness filled his soul with a nameless trouble
and a vague unrest. He was no longer a child of the Ghetto.

JOSEPH THE DREAMER

I

"We must not wait longer, Rachel," said Manasseh in low, grave, but
unfaltering accents. "Midnight approaches."

Rachel checked her sobs and assumed an attitude of reverence as her
husban