"What! They didn't let you finish teaching the boy his Portion because you couldn't write English?"
"No; they had another pretext--one of the servant girls said I wanted to kiss her--lies and falsehood. I was kissing my finger after kissing the _Mezuzah_, and the stupid abomination thought I was kissing my hand to her. It sees itself that they don't kiss the _Mezuzahs_ often in that house--the impious crew. And what will be now? The stupid boy will go home to breakfast in a bazaar of costly presents, and he will make the stupid speech written by the fool of an Englishman, and the ladies will weep. But where will be the Judaism in all this? Who will vaccinate him against free-thinking as I would have done? Who will infuse into him the true patriotic fervor, the love of his race, the love of Zion, the land of his fathers?"
"Ah, you are verily a man after my own heart!" said Guedalyah, the greengrocer, overswept by a wave of admiration. "Why should you not come with me to my _Beth-Hamidrash_ to-night, to the meeting for the foundation of the Holy Land League? That cauliflower will be four-pence, mum."
"I have an idea; a score of us meet to-night to discuss it."
"Ah, yes! You have always ideas. You are a sage and a saint, Guedalyah. The _Beth-Hamidrash_ which you have established is the only centre of real orthodoxy and Jewish literature in London. The ideas you expound in the Jewish papers for the amelioration of the lot of our poor brethren are most statesmanlike. But these donkey-head English rich people--what help can you expect from them? They do not even understand your plans. They have only sympathy with needs of the stomach."
"You are right! You are right, Pinchas!" said Guedalyah, the greengrocer, eagerly. He was a tall, loosely-built man, with a pasty complexion capable of shining with enthusiasm. He was dressed shabbily, and in the intervals of selling cabbages projected the regeneration of Judah.
"That is just what is beginning to dawn upon me, Pinchas," he went on. "Our rich people give plenty away in charity; they have good hearts but not Jewish hearts. As the verse says,--A bundle of rhubarb and two pounds of Brussels sprouts and threepence halfpenny change. Thank you. Much obliged.--Now I have bethought myself why should we not work out our own salvation? It is the poor, the oppressed, the persecuted, whose souls pant after the Land of Israel as the hart after the water-brooks. Let us help ourselves. Let us put our hands in our own pockets. With our _Groschen_ let us rebuild Jerusalem and our Holy Temple. We will collect a fund slowly but surely--from all parts of the East End and the provinces the pious will give. With the first fruits we will send out a little party of persecuted Jews to Palestine; and then another; and another. The movement will grow like a sliding snow-ball that becomes an avalanche."