“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.”

“Yes, then the rich will come to you,” said Pinchas, intensely excited.  “Ah! it is a great idea, like all yours.  Yes, I will come, I will make a mighty speech, for my lips, like Isaiah’s, have been touched with the burning coal.  I will inspire all hearts to start the movement at once.  I will write its Marseillaise this very night, bedewing my couch with a poet’s tears.  We shall no longer be dumb—­we shall roar like the lions of Lebanon.  I shall be the trumpet to call the dispersed together from the four corners of the earth—­yea, I shall be the Messiah himself,” said Pinchas, rising on the wings of his own eloquence, and forgetting to puff at his cigar.

“I rejoice to see you so ardent; but mention not the word Messiah, for I fear some of our friends will take alarm and say that these are not Messianic times, that neither Elias, nor Gog, King of Magog, nor any of the portents have yet appeared.  Kidneys or regents, my child?”

“Stupid people!  Hillel said more wisely:  ’If I help not myself who will help me?’ Do they expect the Messiah to fall from heaven?  Who knows but I am the Messiah?  Was I not born on the ninth of Ab?”

“Hush, hush!” said Guedalyah, the greengrocer.  “Let us be practical.  We are not yet ready for Marseillaises or Messiahs.  The first step is to get funds enough to send one family to Palestine.”

“Yes, yes,” said Pinchas, drawing vigorously at his cigar to rekindle it.  “But we must look ahead.  Already I see it all.  Palestine in the hands of the Jews—­the Holy Temple rebuilt, a Jewish state, a President who is equally accomplished with the sword and the pen,—­the whole campaign stretches before me.  I see things like Napoleon, general and dictator alike.”

“Truly we wish that,” said the greengrocer cautiously.  “But to-night it is only a question of a dozen men founding a collecting society.”