They had concluded Maariv, recited the first four chapters of the Psalms and the Song of Unity, and the people went home, to lay in new strength for the morrow.

There remained only a few, who spent the greater part of the night repeating Psalms, intoning the Mishnah, and so on; they snatched an occasional doze on the bare floor overlaid with a whisp of hay, an old cloak under their head. Berel also stayed the night in the house-of-study. He sat down in a corner, in robe and Tallis, and began reciting Psalms with a pleasing pathos, and he went on until overtaken by sleep. At first he resisted, he took a nice pinch of snuff, rubbed his eyes, collected his thoughts, but it was no good. The covers of the book of Psalms seemed to have been greased, for they continually slipped from his grasp, the printed lines had grown crooked and twisted, his head felt dreadfully heavy, and his eyelids clung together; his nose was forever drooping towards the book of Psalms. He made every effort to keep awake, started up every time as though he had burnt himself, but sleep was the stronger of the two. Gradually he slid from the bench onto the floor; the Psalter slipped finally from between his fingers, his head dropped onto the hay, and he fell sweetly asleep....

And Berel had a dream:

Yom Kippur, and yet there is a fair in the town, the kind of fair one calls an "earthquake," a fair such as Berel does not remember having seen these many years, so crowded is it with men and merchandise. There is something of everything—cattle, horses, sheep, corn, and fruit. All the Tamschevate Jews are strolling round with their wives and children, there is buying and selling, the air is full of noise and shouting, the whole fair is boiling and hissing and humming like a kettle. One runs this way and one that way, this one is driving a cow, that one leading home a horse by the rein, the other buying a whole cart-load of corn. Berel is all astonishment and curiosity: how is it possible for Jews to busy themselves with commerce on Yom Kippur? on such a holy day? As far back as he can remember, Jews used to spend the whole day in Shool, in linen socks, white robe, and prayer-scarf. They prayed and wept. And now what has come over them, that they should be trading on Yom Kippur, as if it were a common week-day, in shoes and boots (this last struck him more than anything)? Perhaps it is all a dream? thought Berel in his sleep. But no, it is no dream! "Here I am strolling round the fair, wide awake. And the screaming and the row in my ears, is that a dream, too? And my having this very minute been bumped on the shoulder by a Gentile going past me with a horse—is that a dream? But if the whole world is taking part in the fair, it's evidently the proper thing to do...." Meanwhile he was watching a peasant with a horse, and he liked the look of the horse so much that he bought it and mounted it. And he looked at it from where he sat astride, and saw the horse was a horse, but at the selfsame time it was Moisheh Chalfon as well. Berel wondered: how is it possible for it to be at once a horse and a man? But his own eyes told him it was so. He wanted to dismount, but the horse bears him to a shop. Here he climbed down and asked for a pound of sugar. Berel kept his eyes on the scales, and—a fresh surprise! Where they should have been weighing sugar, they were weighing his good and bad deeds. And the two scales were nearly equally laden, and oscillated up and down in the air....

Suddenly they threw a sheet of paper into the scale that held his bad deeds. Berel looked to see—it was the hundred-ruble-note which he had appropriated at Moisheh Chalfon's! But it was now much larger, bordered with black, and the letters and numbers were red as fire. The piece of paper was frightfully heavy, it was all two men could do to carry it to the weighing-machine, and when they had thrown it with all their might onto the scale, something snapped, and the scale went down, down, down.

At that moment a man sleeping at Berel's head stretched out a foot, and gave Berel a kick in the head. Berel awoke.

Not far from him sat a grey-haired old Jew, huddled together, enfolded in a Tallis and robe, repeating Psalms with a melancholy chant and a broken, quavering voice.

Berel caught the words:

"Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright:
For the end of that man is peace.
But the transgressors shall be destroyed together:
The latter end of the wicked shall be cut off...."

Berel looked round in a fright: Where is he? He had quite forgotten that he had remained for the night in the house-of-study. He gazed round with sleepy eyes, and they fell on some white heaps wrapped in robes and prayer-scarfs, while from their midst came the low, hoarse, tearful voices of two or three men who had not gone to sleep and were repeating Psalms. Many of the candles were already sputtering, the wax was melting into the sand, the flames rose and fell, and rose again, flaring brightly.