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'And Joseph's mother called to him from the grave: Be comforted, my son, a great future shall be thine." "The end is near," Old Four-Eyes whispered to the father in jargon.

Moses trembled from head to foot. "My poor lamb! My poor Benjamin," he wailed. "I thought thou wouldst say Kaddish after me, not I for thee." Then he began to recite quietly the Hebrew prayers. The hat he should have removed was appropriate enough now.

Benjamin sat up excitedly in bed: "There's Mother, Esther!" he cried in English. "Coming back with my coat. But what's the use of it now?"

His head fell back again. Presently a look of yearning came over the face so full of boyish beauty. "Esther," he said, "wouldn't you like to be in the green country to-day? Look how the sun shines!"

It shone indeed, with deceptive warmth, bathing in gold the green country that stretched beyond, and dazzling the eyes of the dying boy. The birds twittered outside the window.

"Esther," he said wistfully, "do you think there'll be another funeral soon?"

The matron burst into tears and turned away.

"Benjamin," cried the father, frantically, thinking the end had come, say the Shemang."

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The boy stared at him, a clearer look in his eyes.

Say the Shemang!" said Moses, peremptorily. The word Shemang, the old authoritative tone, penetrated the consciousness of the dying boy.

"Yes, father, I was just going to," he grumbled, submissively.

They repeated the last declaration of the dying Israelite together. It was in Hebrew. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." Both understood that. Benjamin lingered on a few more minutes, and died in a painless torpor.

"He is dead," said the doctor.

"Blessed be the true Judge," said Moses. He rent his coat and closed the staring eyes. Then he went to the toilet-table and turned the looking-glass to the wall, and

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opened the window and emptied the jug of water upon the green, sunlit grass.- Children of the Ghetto.

Z

OLA, ÉMILE, a French novelist and dramatist;

born at Paris April 21, 1840; died there September 29, 1902. His parents removed to Aix, where his father, an engineer of reputation, was employed on the construction of the canal which still bears his name. In 1858 Zola returned to Paris, studied at the Lycée St. Louis, and obtained employment in the publishing house of Hachette & Co., with which he remained connected until 1865. His first book, Contes à Ninon, appeared in 1864. He then resolved. to devote himself to authorship, and published in rapid succession La Confession de Claude (1865); Vœu d'une Morte (1866); Mes Haines, a collection of literary and artistic conversations (1866); Les Mystères de Marseille, Manet, and Thérè se Raquin (1867), and Madeleine Férat (1868). His series of romances, Les Rougon Macquart, Histoire Naturelle et Sociale d'une Famille sous le Second Empire, in which he turns all the mud of human nature to the sun, comprises La Fortune des Rougon (1871); La Curée (1874); La Conquête de Plassans (1874); L'Assommoir (1874-77); Le Ventre de Paris (1875); La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875); Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876); Une Page d'Amour (1878); Nana (1880); Pot-Bouille (1882); Au Bonheur des Dames (1883); La Joie de Vivre (1884); Germinal, L'Œuvre, La Terre (1887), and Le Rêve (1888), the last-mentioned book being so unlike the others that it VOL. XXIV.—32

has been called "a snow-drop among weeds." Zola dramatized Thérèse Raquin, and published two other dramas, Les Héritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de Rose. His critical works, Le Roman Expérimental and Le Naturalisme au Théâtre, give his theory of the sphere of romance and the drama. His later works include La Bête Humaine (1890); L'Argent (1891); La de Bâele (1892); Le Docteur Pascal (1893); Lourdes (1894); Rome (1895); Paris (1898); Fécondité (1900); Labor (1901), and Truth (1902).

A WAIF IN THE STORM.

During the hard winter of 1860 the Oise froze, deep snows covered the plains of lower Picardy, and on Christmas Day a sudden storm from the Northeast almost buried Beaumont. The snow began to fall in the morning, fell twice as fast toward evening, and was massed in heavy drifts during the night. In the upper town, at the end of the Street of the Goldsmiths, bounded by the north face of the cathedral transept, the snow, driven by the wind, was engulfed, and beaten against the door of St. Agnes, that antique, half Gothic portal, rich with sculptures under the bareness of the gable. At dawn the next day it was more than three feet deep.

The street still slumbered after the festivities of the night. Six o'clock struck. In the shadows which tinged with blue the slow, dizzying fall of the snowflakes, a solitary, irresolute form gave sign of life, a tiny nineyear-old girl, who had taken refuge under the archway of the entrance and had passed the night there shivering. She was clad in tatters, her head wrapped in a rag of foulard, her bare feet thrust into a man's large shoes. She must have stranded there after long wandering in the town, for she had fallen from weariness. The end of all things seemed to have come for her; nothing was left but abandonment, gnawing hunger, killing cold. Choked with the heavy beating of her heart, she had ceased to struggle. There remained only the physical

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