The Yoke Of The Thorah

the window. All day long the sun had shone bright and hot; but ever since dusk the sky had been clouding over; and now, plainly, a thunder-storm was near at hand. The atmosphere was thick,

the noise of banging shutters, and of loose things generally being knocked about. The flames in the street-lamps below flared violently. Some of them went out. Big drops of lukewarm

this world of uncertainties, so confident was he that the morrow evening would make of him and Christine man and wife. Of course, there was always the unforeseen to be allowed for; accidents were always possible. But if he had none but supermundane obstacles to dread, then he might regard his marriage as already an accomplished fact. And, notwithstanding, Elias felt very much disturbed-very much annoyed, mystified, and ill-at-ease. All that the rabbi had said was stuff and nonsense, at absolute, obvious variance with science, with simple common sense-fit material for laughter, for a certain contemptuous pity; but, nevertheless, every time that Elias recalled just what the rabbi had said, and the rabbi's manner of saying it, he felt a sharp, inward pang, very like terror; he had to catch a quick,

ould be unsettled by the senseless menaces of a superstitious old bigot! Like a child frightened by its nurse's bugaboo. And yet, there it was again, the

ke a hateful tune that one has heard, and can't get rid of. The painful emotions it awoke, kept rankling in his bosom, and crowded out all the sweeter ones that sought to enter. He could fix his mind permanently upon no subject but the rabbi's irrational predictions. He tried to stir up a little interest in the thunder-storm. There it was, raging furiously just outside his open window; rain dashing earthward like a loosened flood; lightning-flash fo

d his teeth. "Praying for mischief!" he thought. "And what-what if, after all, there should be some efficacy in that sort of prayer!"-He remembered and rejoiced that he had told the rabbi nothing further about Christine than her name-neither her father's name, nor her place of abode.

clothing. When, by and by, he became aware that his coat-sleeve had got

three or four chairs, a life-size lay-figure stripped of its draperies, an easel or two, and a few time-blackened plaster casts fastened to the wall. But over in one corner there was heaped up an assortment of miscellaneous odds and ends, the accumulation of half a dozen years, wh

enly, a gleam as of inspiration brightening his features, "What time," he asked himself, "could be better than the present? If I go to b

a chair, and, not incurious as to what long-lost objects h

bills, cracked bottles, cigarette-stumps, cast-off gloves, pocket handkerchiefs, cravats; all sheeted over with fine, black dust, and all exhaling a musty, oily odor; these were the elements that predominated, and most of these Elias tossed pell-mell to the middle of the floor, for the maid to carry away in the morning. To divert one's thoughts from some persistent and exasperating topic, it is a commonplace, there is nothing like busying one's fingers; ma

ning had ceased, and the rain ha

sister-who lived in New Orleans, and whom he had never seen. It had got lost, in a most inexplicable manner, very-soon after its reception; and, conscience-smitten, Elias now recollected

you to be great, like Ephraim and Manasseh!" And immediately, of course, in his boyish enthusiasm, he had set himself down, and put the pencil to its virgin use, by inditing with it a glowing note of thanks-about the only use he ever had put it to, for very soon afterward it disappeared. And then, the rest, the rest of that wonderful, never-to-be-forgotten day! The pride and the triumph of it! The masterpiece of a dinner that his mother had prepared. The check for a dazzling sum of money, that he had found adroitly folded in with his napkin! The toothsome nut-cake, with its twenty-one symbolic candles! The wine that had been drunken to his health! The speech that the rabbi had made, standing up at the head of the table, and haranguing away as though he had had an audience of a thousand, instead of only Elias and his mother-the mother, however, listening amid tears and smiles, and applauding and nodding her head, as the splendid achievements which the future was to behold at the hands of her son, were prophetically described. The watch the rabbi had given him!-the same that was ticking in his waistcoat-pocket at this very instant. And the prayer that the rabbi had chanted! And how Elias himself, with swelling heart, had joined in the invocation: "Holy, holy Lord, Thou Who art

d thus been started. The church clock across the park rang the half hour, bef

all been intended as portraits, but in the main he could not place them-could not remember the persons who had served as models. One face kept repeating itself; there were as many as a dozen separate studies of it; the face of a young man, aged, presumably, nineteen or twenty years; strangely familiar; the face of some one, beyond doubt, whom he must have known intimately; and yet, knitting his brows, and exerting his memory to the utmost, he was quite unable to recall the original. Odd; and intensely annoying, as baffled memory is apt to be; until, of a sudden, with a thrill of recognition that was by no means agreeable, he identified it as himself. A few pages further along, again with a sudden thrill, but this time with a far stronger and deeper one, he came upon a portrait of his mother. It was badly drawn, finical, over-elaborated; the draperies rigid as iron; the flesh wooden; the pose-she was seated, reading-awkward, and anat

all give an account written some two years la

to have changed totally in quality; it seemed to have ceased to be a face drawn with black lead upon paper, and to have become a face in veritable flesh and blood. The hair had apparently become hair. There was color in the cheeks. And the eyes were liquid, living eyes. They-the eyes-were what most affected me. Large, black, mournful, as her eyes had been in life, they looked into my eyes with an expression-I can't describe it. It was what you would call an expression of intense agony, and of appeal; as though it were an agony of my causing, and one that she appealed to me to relieve. The lips-bluish white, as her lips were, toward the end of her life-the lips seemed to move, and kept moving, as if trying to speak, but unabl

many days, in view of our approaching marriage; consider the interview that I had had with my uncle, only an hour or two earlier, and the high pitch of agitation to which it had wrought me up; consider that it was long past my customary bedtime, and that my brain was irritated by lack of sleep, for I had not slept much of any the night before; consider that my mother was just then the one person uppermost in my thoughts, having been vividly recalled to me first by the pencil I had found, and then by the drawing that I was looking at; consider finally that my bodily posture-bending over till my che

isted in haunting me, in spite of the efforts I made to forget it. Strive as I might, I could not shake off the fear, the uneasiness, that it had inspired. Thinking of it, even at this distance, I still wince a little. It prod