'The part surest to be read! The very first line of the paper is simply shocking. It reads:
'"Death.
'"On the 29th ult., at 22 Buckley Street, 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.