cheerful gas light, with brandy and whiskey and sweets and fruit to
hand, with no trains or busses to catch, what wonder if the
light-hearted assembly played far into the new day?

Meanwhile the Redeemed Son slept peacefully in his crib with his legs
curled up, and his little fists clenched beneath the coverlet.




CHAPTER V.

THE PAUPER ALIEN.


Moses Ansell married mainly because all men are mortal. He knew he would
die and he wanted an heir. Not to inherit anything, but to say _Kaddish_
for him. _Kaddish_ is the most beautiful and wonderful mourning prayer
ever written. Rigidly excluding all references to death and grief, it
exhausts itself in supreme glorification of the Eternal and in
supplication for peace upon the House of Israel. But its significance
has been gradually transformed; human nature, driven away with a
pitchfork, has avenged itself by regarding the prayer as a mass, not
without purgatorial efficacy, and so the Jew is reluctant to die without
leaving some one qualified to say _Kaddish_ after him every day for a
year, and then one day a year. That is one reason why sons are of such
domestic importance.

Moses had only a mother in the world when he married Gittel Silverstein,
and he hoped to restore the balance of male relatives by this reckless