“I shall be late for school!” he cried, making for the door.

“Stop! stop!” shouted his father.  “Thou hast not yet said grace.”

“Oh, yes, I have, father.  While you were all telling stories I was benshing quietly to myself.”

“Is Saul also among the prophets, is Levi also among the story-tellers?” murmured Pinchas to himself.  Aloud he said:  “The child speaks truth; I saw his lips moving.”

Levi gave the poet a grateful look, snatched up his satchel and ran off to No. 1 Royal Street.  Pinchas followed him soon, inwardly upbraiding Reb Shemuel for meanness.  He had only as yet had his breakfast for his book.  Perhaps it was Simcha’s presence that was to blame.  She was the Reb’s right hand and he did not care to let her know what his left was doing.

He retired to his study when Pinchas departed, and the Rebbitzin clattered about with a besom.

The study was a large square room lined with book-shelves and hung with portraits of the great continental Rabbis.  The books were bibliographical monsters to which the Family Bibles of the Christian are mere pocket-books.  They were all printed purely with the consonants, the vowels being divined grammatically or known by heart.  In each there was an island of text in a sea of commentary, itself lost in an ocean of super-commentary that was bordered by a continent of super-super-commentary.  Reb Shemuel knew many of these immense folios—­with all their tortuous windings of argument and anecdote—­much as the child knows the village it was born in, the crooked by-ways and the field paths.  Such and such a Rabbi gave such and such an opinion on such and such a line from the bottom of such and such a page—­his memory of it was a visual picture.  And just as the child does not connect its native village with the broader world without, does not trace its streets and turnings till they lead to the great towns, does not inquire as to its origins and its history, does not view it in relation to other villages, to the country, to the continent, to the world, but loves it for itself and in itself, so Reb Shemuel regarded and reverenced and loved these gigantic pages with their serried battalions of varied type.  They were facts—­absolute as the globe itself—­regions of wisdom, perfect and self-sufficing.  A little obscure here and there, perhaps, and in need of amplification or explication for inferior intellects—­a half-finished manuscript commentary on one of the super-commentaries, to be called “The Garden of Lilies,” was lying open on Reb Shemuel’s own desk—­but yet the only true encyclopaedia of things terrestrial and divine.  And, indeed, they were wonderful books.  It was as difficult to say what was not in them as what was.  Through them the old Rabbi held communion with his God whom he loved with all his heart and soul and thought of as a genial Father, watching tenderly over His froward children and chastising them because He loved them.