It was as a hawker that he believed himself most gifted, and he never lost the conviction that if he could only get a fair start, he had in him the makings of a millionaire.  Yet there was scarcely anything cheap with which he had not tramped the country, so that when poor Benjamin, who profited by his mother’s death to get into the Orphan Asylum, was asked to write a piece of composition on “The Methods of Travelling,” he excited the hilarity of the class-room by writing that there were numerous ways of travelling, for you could travel with sponge, lemons, rhubarb, old clothes, jewelry, and so on, for a page of a copy book.  Benjamin was a brilliant boy, yet he never shook off some of the misleading associations engendered by the parental jargon.  For Mrs. Ansell had diversified her corrupt German by streaks of incorrect English, being of a much more energetic and ambitious temperament than the conservative Moses, who dropped nearly all his burden of English into her grave.  For Benjamin, “to travel” meant to wander about selling goods, and when in his books he read of African travellers, he took it for granted that they were but exploiting the Dark Continent for small profits and quick returns.

And who knows?  Perhaps of the two species, it was the old Jewish peddlers who suffered the more and made the less profit on the average.  For the despised three-hatted scarecrow of Christian caricature, who shambled along snuffling “Old clo’,” had a strenuous inner life, which might possibly have vied in intensity, elevation, and even sense of humor, with that of the best of the jeerers on the highway.  To Moses, “travelling” meant straying forlornly in strange towns and villages, given over to the worship of an alien deity and ever ready to avenge his crucifixion; in a land of whose tongue he knew scarce more than the Saracen damsel married by legend to a Becket’s father.  It meant praying brazenly in crowded railway trains, winding the phylacteries sevenfold round his left arm and crowning his forehead with a huge leather bump of righteousness, to the bewilderment or irritation of unsympathetic fellow-passengers.  It meant living chiefly on dry bread and drinking black tea out of his own cup, with meat and fish and the good things of life utterly banned by the traditional law, even if he were flush.  It meant carrying the red rag of an obnoxious personality through a land of bulls.  It meant passing months away from wife and children, in a solitude only occasionally alleviated by a Sabbath spent in a synagogue town.  It meant putting up at low public houses and common lodging houses, where rowdy disciples of the Prince of Peace often sent him bleeding to bed, or shamelessly despoiled him of his merchandise, or bullied and blustered him out of his fair price, knowing he dared not resent.  It meant being chaffed and gibed at in language of which he only understood that it was cruel, though certain trite facetiae grew intelligible to him by repetition.