Then there rose in his place among the Sirdars and the nobles one clad in silk, who folded his hands and said, ’This is the truth of God, for I, who, by the favour of God and the Amir, am such as you know, was once clerk to that money-lender.’

There was a pause, and the Amir cried hoarsely to the prisoner, throwing scorn upon him, till he ended with the dread ‘Dar arid,’ which clinches justice.

So they led the thief away, and the whole of him was seen no more together; and the Court rustled out of its silence, whispering, ’Before God and the Prophet, but this is a man!’

JEWS IN SHUSHAN [Footnote:  Copyright, 1981, by Macmillan & Co.]

My newly purchased house furniture was, at the least, insecure; the legs parted from the chairs, and the tops from the tables, on the slightest provocation.  But such as it was, it was to be paid for, and Ephraim, agent and collector for the local auctioneer, waited in the verandah with the receipt.  He was announced by the Mahomedan servant as ’Ephraim, Yahudi’—­Ephraim the Jew.  He who believes in the Brotherhood of Man should hear my Elahi Bukhsh grinding the second word through his white teeth with all the scorn he dare show before his master.  Ephraim was, personally, meek in manner—­so meek indeed that one could not understand how he had fallen into the profession of bill-collecting.  He resembled an over-fed sheep, and his voice suited his figure.  There was a fixed, unvarying mask of childish wonder upon his face.  If you paid him, he was as one marvelling at your wealth; if you sent him away, he seemed puzzled at your hard-heartedness.  Never was Jew more unlike his dread breed.  Ephraim wore list slippers and coats of duster-cloth, so preposterously patterned that the most brazen of British subalterns would have shied from them in fear.  Very slow and deliberate was his speech, and carefully guarded to give offence to no one.  After many weeks, Ephraim was induced to speak to me of his friends.

’There be eight of us in Shushan, and we are waiting till there are ten.  Then we shall apply for a synagogue, and get leave from Calcutta.  To-day we have no synagogue; and I, only I, am Priest and Butcher to our people.  I am of the tribe of Judah—­I think, but I am not sure.  My father was of the tribe of Judah, and we wish much to get our synagogue.  I shall be a priest of that synagogue.’

Shushan is a big city in the North of India, counting its dwellers by the ten thousand; and these eight of the Chosen People were shut up in its midst, waiting till time or chance sent them their full congregation.