The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with “Eis” and “Ois” not in concord.

“Shah!” said the President at last.  “Make an end, make an end!”

“You see he knows I’m right,” murmured the Shalotten Shammos to his circle.

“And if you are!” burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort.  “And if I do sing the Passover Yigdal instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have no bread in the house?  With my salary I have Passover all the year round.”

The Chazan’s sally made a good impression on his audience if not on his salary.  It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the conversation was hastily shifted to the original topic.

“We mustn’t forget the Maggid draws crowds here every Saturday and Sunday afternoon,” said Mendel Hyams.  “Suppose he goes over to a Chevrah that will pay him more!”

“No, he won’t do that,” said another of the Committee.  “He will remember that we brought him out of Poland.”

“Yes, but we shan’t have room for the audiences soon,” said Belcovitch.  “There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon and the other half the second two hours.”

“No, no, that would be cruel,” said Karlkammer.  “He will have to give the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue.  My own Shool, the German, will be glad to give him facilities.”

“But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary?” said Mendel.

“No, I’m on the Committee, I’ll see to that,” said Karlkammer reassuringly.

“Then do you think we shall tell him we can’t afford to give him more?” asked Belcovitch.

There was a murmur of assent with a fainter mingling of dissent.  The motion that the Maggid’s application be refused was put to the vote and carried by a large majority.

It was the fate of the Maggid to be the one subject on which Belcovitch and the Shalotten Shammos agreed.  They agreed as to his transcendent merits and they agreed as to the adequacy of his salary.

“But he’s so weakly,” protested Mendel Hyams, who was in the minority.  “He coughs blood.”

“He ought to go to a sunny place for a week,” said Belcovitch compassionately.

“Yes, he must certainly have that,” said Karlkammer.  “Let us add as a rider that although we cannot pay him more per week, he must have a week’s holiday in the country.  The Shalotten Shammos shall write the letter to Rothschild.”

Rothschild was a magic name in the Ghetto; it stood next to the Almighty’s as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the poor, and the Shalotten Shammos made a large part of his income by writing letters to it.  He charged twopence halfpenny per letter, for his English vocabulary was larger than any other scribe’s in the Ghetto, and his words were as much longer than theirs as his body.  He also filled up printed application forms for Soup or Passover cakes, and had a most artistic sense of the proportion of orphans permissible to widows and a correct instinct for the plausible duration of sicknesses.