not a common eighteen-penny benediction, but a guinea one, with half-crown blessings thrown in for his parents and the congregation, and a gift of five shillings to the minister.  That was of course in our own Chevrah, not reckoning the guinea my Michael shnodared at Duke’s Plaizer Shool.  You know we always keep two seats at Duke’s Plaizer as well.”  Duke’s Plaizer was the current distortion of Duke’s Place.

“What magnanimity,” said Moses overawed.

“I like to do everything with decorum,” said Malka.  “No one can say I have ever acted otherwise than as a fine person.  I dare say thou couldst do with a few shillings thyself now.”

Moses hung his head still lower.  “You see my mother is so poorly,” he stammered.  “She is a very old woman, and without anything to eat she may not live long.”

“They ought to take her into the Aged Widows’ Home.  I’m sure I gave her my votes.”

“God shall bless you for it.  But people say I was lucky enough to get my Benjamin into the Orphan Asylum, and that I ought not to have brought her from Poland.  They say we grow enough poor old widows here.”

“People say quite right—­at least she would have starved in, a Yiddishe country, not in a land of heathens.”

“But she was lonely and miserable out there, exposed to all the malice of the Christians.  And I was earning a pound a week.  Tailoring was a good trade then.  The few roubles I used to send her did not always reach her.”

“Thou hadst no right to send her anything, nor to send for her.  Mothers are not everything.  Thou didst marry my cousin Gittel, peace be upon him, and it was thy duty to support her and her children.  Thy mother took the bread out of the mouth of Gittel, and but for her my poor cousin might have been alive to-day.  Believe me it was no Mitzvah.”

Mitzvah is a “portmanteau-word.”  It means a commandment and a good deed, the two conceptions being regarded as interchangeable.

“Nay, thou errest there,” answered Moses. “’Gittel was not a phoenix which alone ate not of the Tree of Knowledge and lives for ever.  Women have no need to live as long as men, for they have not so many Mitzvahs to perform as men; and inasmuch as”—­here his tones involuntarily assumed the argumentative sing-song—­“their souls profit by all the Mitzvahs performed by their husbands and children, Gittel will profit by the Mitzvah I did in bringing over my mother, so that even if she did die through it, she will not be the loser thereby.  It stands in the Verse that man shall do the Mitzvahs and live by them.  To live is a Mitzvah, but it is plainly one of those Mitzvahs that have to be done at a definite time, from which species women, by reason of their household duties, are exempt; wherefore I would deduce by another circuit that it is not so incumbent upon women to live as upon men.  Nevertheless, if God had willed it, she would have been still alive.  The Holy One, blessed be He, will provide for the little ones He has sent into the world.  He fed Elijah the prophet by ravens, and He will never send me a black Sabbath.”