“Can’t they?” said De Haan.  “You’ve done so much damage to orthodoxy that we don’t know whether to go on with the paper.”

“You’re joking,” murmured Raphael.

“I wish I was,” laughed De Haan bitterly.

“But you astonish me.” persisted Raphael.  “Would you be so good as to point out where I have gone wrong?”

“With pleasure.  Or rather with pain,” said De Haan.  Each of the committee drew a tattered copy from his pocket, and followed De Haan’s demonstration with a murmured accompaniment of lamentation.

“The paper was founded to inculcate the inspection of cheese, the better supervision of the sale of meat, the construction of ladies’ baths, and all the principles of true Judaism,” said De Haan gloomily, “and there’s not one word about these things, but a great deal about spirituality and the significance of the ritual.  But I will begin at the beginning.  Page 1—­”

“But that’s advertisements,” muttered Raphael.

“The part surest to be read!  The very first line of the paper is simply shocking.  It reads: 

“Death:  On the 59th ult., at 22 Buckley St., the Rev. Abraham Barnett, in his fifty-fourth—­”

“But death is always shocking; what’s wrong about that?” interposed little Sampson.

“Wrong!” repeated De Haan, witheringly.  “Where did you get that from?  That was never sent in.”

“No, of course not,” said the sub-editor.  “But we had to have at least one advertisement of that kind; just to show we should be pleased to advertise our readers’ deaths.  I looked in the daily papers to see if there were any births or marriages with Jewish names, but I couldn’t find any, and that was the only Jewish-sounding death I could see.”

“But the Rev. Abraham Barnett was a Meshumad,” shrieked Sugarman the Shadchan.  Raphael turned pale.  To have inserted an advertisement about an apostate missionary was indeed terrible.  But little Sampson’s audacity did not desert him.

“I thought the orthodox party would be pleased to hear of the death of a Meshumad,” he said suavely, screwing his eyeglass more tightly into its orbit, “on the same principle that anti-Semites take in the Jewish papers to hear of the death of Jews.”

For a moment De Haan was staggered.  “That would be all very well,” he said; “let him be an atonement for us all, but then you’ve gone and put ‘May his soul he bound up in the bundle of life.’”

It was true.  The stock Hebrew equivalent for R.I.P. glared from the page.

“Fortunately, that taking advertisement of kosher trousers comes just underneath,” said De Haan, “and that may draw off the attention.  On page 2 you actually say in a note that Rabbenu Bachja’s great poem on repentance should be incorporated in the ritual and might advantageously replace the obscure Piyut by Kalir.  But this is rank Reform—­it’s worse than the papers we come to supersede.”