And so the stuffy room with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives.  Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the name of the Eternal.

The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the fulness of life was not theirs.

And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and there a parent.

* * * * *

The elders of the synagogue were met in council.

“He is greater than a Prince,” said the Shalotten Shammos.

“If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale,” said Mr. Belcovitch, “and our Maggid, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh them all.  He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has been seen bareheaded.”

“From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses,” said old Mendel Hyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.

“Oh no,” said the Shalotten Shammos, who was a great stickler for precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies.  “I can’t admit that.  Look at my brother Nachmann.”

There was a general laugh at the Shalotten Shammos’s bull; the proverb dealing only with Moseses.

“He has the true gift,” observed Froom Karlkammer, shaking the flames of his hair pensively.  “For the letters of his name have the same numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon.”

Froom Karlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation and only worshipped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions.  The Shalotten Shammos, however, was of contradictory temperament—­a born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch’s presidential cup.  He was a long thin man, who towered above the congregation, and was as tall as the bulk of them even when he was bowing his acknowledgments to his Maker.

“How do you make that out?” he asked Karlkammer.  “Moses of course adds up the same as Moses—­but while the other part of the Maggid’s name makes seventy-three, da Leon’s makes ninety-one.”

“Ah, that’s because you’re ignorant of Gematriyah,” said little Karlkammer, looking up contemptuously at the cantankerous giant.  “You reckon all the letters on the same system, and you omit to give yourself the license of deleting the ciphers.”

In philology it is well known that all consonants are interchangeable and vowels don’t count; in Gematriyah any letter may count for anything, and the total may be summed up anyhow.