"Forever?"
"Well, are you a little boy? Are you likely to get another voice? At your time of life, gone is gone!"
The cantor wrung his hands, threw himself down beside the table, and, laying his head on his arms, he burst out crying like a child.
Next morning the whole town had heard of the misfortune—that the cantor had lost his voice.
"It's an ill wind——" quoted the innkeeper, a well-to-do man. "He won't keep us so long with his trills on Sabbath. I'd take a bitter onion for that voice of his, any day!"
LATE
It was in sad and hopeless mood that Antosh watched the autumn making its way into his peasant's hut. The days began to shorten and the evenings to lengthen, and there was no more petroleum in the hut to fill his humble lamp; his wife complained too—the store of salt was giving out; there was very little soap left, and in a few days he would finish his tobacco. And Antosh cleared his throat, spat, and muttered countless times a day:
"No salt, no soap, no tobacco; we haven't got anything. A bad business!"
Antosh had no prospect of earning anything in the village. The one village Jew was poor himself, and had no work to give. Antosh had only one hope left. Just before the Feast of Tabernacles he would drive a whole cart-load of fir-boughs into the little town and bring a tidy sum of money home in exchange.
He did this every year, since buying his thin horse in the market for six rubles.