"Oh, but I was here before you," said Benjamin laughing.
"Does oor birfday come before mine, then?"
"Yes, if I remember."
Isaac looked tauntingly at the door. "See!" he cried to the absent Sarah. Then turning graciously to Benjamin he said, "I thant kiss oo, but I'll lat oo teep in my new bed."
"But you must kiss him," said Esther, and saw that he did it before she left the room to fetch little Sarah from Mrs. Simons.
When she came back Solomon was letting Benjamin inspect his Plevna peep-show without charge and Moses Ansell was back, too. His eyes were red with weeping, but that was on account of the Maggid. His nose was blue with the chill of the cemetery.
"He was a great man." he was saying to the grandmother. "He could lecture for four hours together on any text and he would always manage to get back to the text before the end. Such exegetics, such homiletics! He was greater than the Emperor of Russia. Woe! Woe!"
"Woe! Woe!" echoed the grandmother. "If women were allowed to go to
funerals, I would gladly have, followed him. Why did he come to England?
In Poland he would still have been alive. And why did I come to England?
Woe! Woe'"
Her head dropped back on the pillow and her sighs passed gently into snores. Moses turned again to his eldest born, feeling that he was secondary in importance only to the Maggid, and proud at heart of his genteel English appearance.
"Well, you'll soon be Bar-mitzvah, Benjamin." he said, with clumsy geniality blent with respect, as he patted his boy's cheeks with his discolored fingers.