“Blessed art thou who arrivest,” he said when he perceived Pinchas.  Then dropping into German he continued—­“I did not know you would join in the rebuilding of Zion.”

“Why not?” inquired Pinchas.

“Because you have written so many poems thereupon.”

“Be not so foolish,” said Pinchas, annoyed.  “Did not King David fight the Philistines as well as write the Psalms?”

“Did he write the Psalms?” said Hamburg quietly, with a smile.

“No—­not so loud!  Of course he didn’t!  The Psalms were written by Judas Maccabaeus, as I proved in the last issue of the Stuttgard Zeitschrift.  But that only makes my analogy more forcible.  You shall see how I will gird on sword and armor, and I shall yet see even you in the forefront of the battle.  I will be treasurer, you shall vote for me, Hamburg, for I and you are the only two people who know the Holy Tongue grammatically, and we must work shoulder to shoulder and see that the balance sheets are drawn up in the language of our fathers.”

In like manner did Melchitsedek Pinchas approach Hiram Lyons and Simon Gradkoski, the former a poverty-stricken pietist who added day by day to a furlong of crabbed manuscript, embodying a useless commentary on the first chapter of Genesis; the latter the portly fancy-goods dealer in whose warehouse Daniel Hyams was employed.  Gradkoski rivalled Reb Shemuel in his knowledge of the exact loci of Talmudical remarks—­page this, and line that—­and secretly a tolerant latitudinarian, enjoyed the reputation of a bulwark of orthodoxy too well to give it up.  Gradkoski passed easily from writing an invoice to writing a learned article on Hebrew astronomy.  Pinchas ignored Joseph Strelitski whose raven curl floated wildly over his forehead like a pirate’s flag, though Hamburg, who was rather surprised to see the taciturn young man at a meeting, strove to draw him into conversation.  The man to whom Pinchas ultimately attached himself was only a man in the sense of having attained his religious majority.  He was a Harrow boy named Raphael Leon, a scion of a wealthy family.  The boy had manifested a strange premature interest in Jewish literature and had often seen Gabriel Hamburg’s name in learned foot-notes, and, discovering that he was in England, had just written to him.  Hamburg had replied; they had met that day for the first time and at the lad’s own request the old scholar brought him on to this strange meeting.  The boy grew to be Hamburg’s one link with wealthy England, and though he rarely saw Leon again, the lad came in a shadowy way to take the place he had momentarily designed for Joseph Strelitski.  To-night it was Pinchas who assumed the paternal manner, but he mingled it with a subtle obsequiousness that made the shy simple lad uncomfortable, though when he came to read the poet’s lofty sentiments which arrived (with an acrostic dedication) by the first post next morning, he conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the neglected genius.