No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the bitter end.  They were written in good English modified by a few peculiar terms used in senses unsuspected by dictionary-makers; in a beautiful hand, with the t’s uncrossed, but crowned with the side-stroke, so as to avoid the appearance of the symbol of Christianity, and with the dates expressed according to the Hebrew Calendar, for Karlkammer refused to recognize the chronology of the Christian.  He made three copies of every letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every line.  His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was a business man and had to earn his living by day.  Kept within the limits of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance.  The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare’s plays was mere child’s play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer’s belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew literature.  Nor were these ideas of his own origination.  His was an eclectic philosophy and religionism, of which all the elements were discoverable in old Hebrew books:  scraps of Alexandrian philosophy inextricably blent with Aristotelian, Platonic, mystic.

He kept up a copious correspondence with scholars in other countries and was universally esteemed and pitied.

“We haven’t come to discuss the figures of the Maggid’s name, but of his salary.” said Mr. Belcovitch, who prided himself on his capacity for conducting public business.

“I have examined the finances,” said Karlkammer, “and I don’t see how we can possibly put aside more for our preacher than the pound a week.”

“But he is not satisfied,” said Mr. Belcovitch.

“I don’t see why he shouldn’t be,” said the Shalotten Shammos.  “A pound a week is luxury for a single man.”

The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptive Maggid sent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder, that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.

“I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week,” grumbled Greenberg the Chazan.