Promised Land — I Remember

CHAPTER V I REMEMBER

My father and mother could tell me much more that I have forgotten, or that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from those broken recollections only which, recurring to me in after years, filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance.

I want to string together those glimpses of my earliest days that dangle in my mind, like little lanterns in the crooked alleys of the past, and show me an elusive little figure that is myself, and yet so much a stranger to me, that I often ask, Can this be I?

I have not much faith in the reality of my first recollection, but as I can never go back over the past without bringing up at last at this sombre little scene, as at a door beyond which I cannot pass, I must put it down for what it is worth in the scheme of my memories.

I see, then, an empty, darkened room.

In the middle, on the floor, lies a long Shape, covered with some black stuff.

There are candles at the head of the Shape.

Dim figures are seated low, against the walls, swaying to and fro.

No sound is in the room, except a moan or a sigh from the shadowy figures; but a child is walking softly around and around the Shape on the floor, in quiet curiosity.

The Shape is the body of my grandfather laid out for burial.

The child is myself--myself asking questions of Death.

I was four years old when my mother's father died.

Do I really remember the little scene?

Perhaps I heard it described by some fond relative, as I heard other anecdotes of my infancy, and unconsciously incorporated it with my genuine recollections.

It is so suitable a scene for a beginning: the darkness, the mystery, the impenetrability.

My share in it, too, is characteristic enough, if I really studied that Shape by the lighted candles, as I have always pretended to myself.

So often afterwards I find myself forgetting the conventional meanings of things, in some search for a meaning of my own.

It is more likely, however, that I took no intellectual interest in my grandfather's remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a First Recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it, to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness.

If I really committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs.

The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in which our little self seems lost.

Somehow I have failed of this illusion.

My grandfather's house, where I was born, stands, in my memory, a small, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys.

Such as it was, the house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the street by a board fence, outside which I am sure there was a bench.

The gate into the yard swung so high from the ground that four-footed visitors did not have to wait till it was opened.

Pigs found their way in, and were shown the way out, under the gate; grunting on their arrival, but squealing on their departure.

[Illustration: MY GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE, WHERE I WAS BORN] Of the interior of the house I remember only one room, and not so much the room as the window, which had a blue sash curtain, and beyond the curtain a view of a narrow, walled garden, where deep-red dahlias grew.

The garden belonged to the house adjoining my grandfather's, where lived the Gentile girl who was kind to me.

Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at all, but poppies.

As a conscientious historian I am bound to record every rumor, but I retain the right to cling to my own impression.

Indeed, I must insist on my dahlias, if I am to preserve the garden at all.

I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see _poppies_ in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and leaves me a gray blank.

I have nothing against poppies.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality.

And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

Ours was a quiet neighborhood.

Across the narrow street was the orderly front of the Korpus, or military academy, with straight rows of unshuttered windows.

It was an imposing edifice in the eyes of us all, because it was built of brick, and was several stories high.

At one of the windows I pretend I remember seeing a tailor mending the uniforms of the cadets.

I knew the uniforms, and I knew, in later years, the man who had been the tailor; but I am not sure that he did not emigrate to America, there to seek his fortune in a candy shop, and his happiness in a family of triplets, twins, and even odds, long before I was old enough to toddle as far as the gate.

Behind my grandfather's house was a low hill, which I do _not_ remember as a mountain.

Perhaps it was only a hump in the ground.

This eminence, of whatever stature, was a part of the Vall, a longer and higher ridge on the top of which was a promenade, and which was said to be the burying-ground of Napoleonic soldiers.

This historic rumor meant very little to me, for I never knew what Napoleon was.

It was not my way to accept unchallenged every superstition that came to my ears.

Among the wild flowers that grew on the grassy slopes of the Vall, there was a small daisy, popularly called "blind flower," because it was supposed to cause blindness in rash children who picked it.

I was rash, if I was awake; and I picked "blind flowers" behind the house, handfuls of them, and enjoyed my eyesight unimpaired.

If my faith in nursery lore was shaken by this experience, I kept my discovery to myself, and did not undertake to enlighten my playmates.

I find other instances, later on, of the curious fact that I was content with _finding out_ for myself.

It is curious to me because I am not so reticent now.

When I discover anything, if only a new tint in the red sunset, I must publish the fact to all my friends.

Is it possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and wisdom was sometimes a capital offence?

In the summer-time I lived outdoors considerably.

I found many occasions to visit my mother in the store, which gave me a long walk.

If my errand was not pressing--or perhaps even if it was--I made a long stop on the Platz, especially if I had a companion with me.

The Platz was a rectangular space in the centre of a roomy square, with a shady promenade around its level lawn.

The Korpus faced on the Platz, which was its drill ground.

Around the square were grouped the fine residences of the officers of the Korpus, with a great white church occupying one side.

These buildings had a fearful interest for me, especially the church, as the dwellings and sanctuary of the enemy;

but on the Platz I was not afraid to play and seek adventures.

I loved to watch the cadets drill and play ball, or pass them close as they promenaded, two and two, looking so perfect in white trousers and jackets and visored caps.

I loved to run with my playmates and lay out all sorts of geometric figures on the four straight sides of the promenade; patterns of infinite variety, traceable only by a pair of tireless feet.

If one got so wild with play as to forget all fear, one could swing, until chased away by the guard, on the heavy chain festoons that encircled the monument at one side of the square.

This was the only monument in Polotzk, dedicated I never knew to whom or what.

It was the monument, as the sky was the sky, and the earth, earth: the only phenomenon of its kind, mysterious, unquestionable.

It was not far from the limits of Polotzk to the fields and woods.

My father was fond of taking us children for a long walk on a Sabbath afternoon.

I have little pictures in my mind of places where we went, though I doubt if they could be found from my descriptions.

I try in vain to conjure up a panoramic view of the neighborhood.

Even when I stood on the apex of the Vall, and saw the level country spread in all directions, my inexperienced eyes failed to give me the picture of the whole.

I saw the houses in the streets below, all going to market.

The highroads wandered out into the country, and disappeared in the sunny distance, where the edge of the earth and the edge of the sky fitted together, like a jewel box with the lid ajar.

In these things I saw what a child always sees: the unrelated fragments of a vast, mysterious world.

But although my geography may be vague, and the scenes I remember as the pieces of a paper puzzle, still my breath catches as I replace this bit or that, and coax the edges to fit together.

I am obstinately positive of some points, and for the rest, you may amend the puzzle if you can.

You may make a survey of Polotzk ever so accurate, and show me where I was wrong; still I am the better guide.

You may show that my adventureful road led nowhere, but I can prove, by the quickening of my pulse and the throbbing of my rapid recollections, that _things happened to me_ there or here; and I shall be believed, not you.

And so over the vague canvas of scenes half remembered, half imagined, I draw the brush of recollection, and pick out here a landmark, there a figure, and set my own feet back in the old ways, and live over the old events.

It is real enough, as by my beating heart you might know.

Sometimes my father took us out by the Long Road.

There is no road in the neighborhood of Polotzk by that name, but I know very well that the way was long to my little feet; and long are the backward thoughts that creep along it, like a sunbeam travelling with the day.

The first landmark on the sunny, dusty road is the house of a peasant acquaintance where we stopped for rest and a drink.

I remember a cool gray interior, a woman with her bosom uncovered pattering barefoot to hand us the hospitable dipper, and a baby smothered in a deep cradle which hung by ropes from the ceiling.

Farther on, the empty road gave us shadows of trees and rustlings of long grass.

This, at least, is what I imagine over the spaces where no certain object is.

Then, I know, we ran and played, and it was father himself who hid in the corn, and we made havoc following after.

Laughing, we ramble on, till we hear the long, far whistle of a locomotive.

The railroad track is just visible over the field on the _left_ of the road; the cornfield, I say, is on the _right_.

We stand on tiptoe and wave our hands and shout as the long train rushes by at a terrific speed, leaving its pennon of smoke behind.

The passing of the train thrilled me wonderfully.

Where did it come from, and whither did it fly, and how did it feel to be one of the faces at the windows?

If ever I dreamed of a world beyond Polotzk, it must have been at those times, though I do not honestly remember.

Somewhere out on that same Long Road is the place where we once attended a wedding.

I do not know who were married, or whether they lived happily ever after; but I remember that when the dancers were wearied, and we were all sated with goodies, day was dawning, and several of the young people went out for a stroll in a grove near by.

They took me with them--who were they?

--and they lost me.

At any rate, when they saw me again, I was a stranger.

For I had sojourned, for an immeasurable moment, in a world apart from theirs.

I had witnessed my first sunrise; I had watched the rosy morning tiptoe in among the silver birches.

And that grove stands on the _left_ side of the road.

We had another stopping-place out in that direction.

It was the place where my mother sent her hundred and more house plants to be cared for one season, because for some reason they could not fare well at home.

We children went to visit them once; and the memory of that is red and white and purple.

The Long Road went ever on and on; I remember no turns.

But we turned at last, when the sun was set and the breeze of evening blew; and sometimes the first star came in and the Sabbath went out before we reached home and supper.

Another way out of town was by the bridge across the Polota.

I recall more than one excursion in that direction.

Sometimes we made a large party, annexing a few cousins and aunts for the day.

At this moment I feel a movement of affection for these relations who shared our country adventures.

I had forgotten what virtue there was in our family; I do like people who can walk.

In those days, it is likely enough, I did not always walk on my own legs, for I was very little, and not strong.

I do not remember being carried, but if any of my big uncles gave me a lift, I am sure I like them all the more for it.

The Dvina River swallowed the Polota many times a day, yet the lesser stream flooded the universe on one occasion.

On the hither bank of that stream, as you go from Polotzk, I should plant a flowering bush, a lilac or a rose, in memory of the life that bloomed in me one day that I was there.

Leisurely we had strolled out of the peaceful town.

It was early spring, and the sky and the earth were two warm palms in which all live things nestled.

Little green leaves trembled on the trees, and the green, green grass sparkled.

We sat us down to rest a little above the bridge; and life flowed in and out of us fully, freely, as the river flowed and parted about the bridge piles.

A market garden lay on the opposite slope, yellow-green with first growth.

In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plow.

I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn.

Suddenly he began to sing, a rude plowman's song.

Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it--a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth.

I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention.

I felt myself discovering things.

Something in me gasped for life, and lay still.

I

was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me.

For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty.

For the space of a wild heartbeat I _knew_, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life.

But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me.

We are not born all at once, but by bits.

The body first and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

Our souls are scarred with the struggles of successive births, and the process is recorded also by the wrinkles in our brains, by the lines in our faces.

Look at me and you will see that I have been born many times.

And my first self-birth happened, as I have told, that spring day of my early springs.

Therefore would I plant a rose on the green bank of the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life.

Eternal, divine life.

This is a tale of immortal life.

Should I be sitting here, chattering of my infantile adventures, if I did not know that I was speaking for thousands?

Should you be sitting there, attending to my chatter, while the world's work waits, if you did not know that I spoke also for you?

I might say "you" or "he" instead of "I." Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you without.

We love to read the lives of the great, yet what a broken history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the humble.

But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and die unheard.

It is well that now and then one is born among the simple with a taste for self-revelation.

The man or woman thus endowed must speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.

* * * * * It is fun to run over the bridge, with a clatter of stout little shoes on resounding timbers.

We pass a walled orchard on the right, and remind each other of the fruit we enjoyed here last summer.

Our next stopping-place is farther on, beyond the wayside inn where lives the idiot boy who gave me such a scare last time.

It is a poor enough place, where we stop, but there is an ice house, the only one I know.

We are allowed to go in and see the greenish masses of ice gleaming in the half-light, and bring out jars of sweet, black "lager beer," which we drink in the sunny doorway.

I shall always remember the flavor of the stuff, and the smell, and the wonder and chill of the ice house.

I vaguely remember something about a convent out in that direction, but I was tired and sleepy after my long walk, and glad to be returning home.

I hope they carried me a bit of the way, for I was very tired.

There were stars out before we reached home, and the men stopped in the middle of the street to bless the new moon.

It is pleasant to recall how we went bathing in the Polota.

On Friday afternoons in summer, when the week's work was done, and the houses of the good housewives stood shining with cleanliness, ready for the Sabbath, parties of women and girls went chattering and laughing down to the river bank.

There was a particular spot which belonged to the women.

I do not know where the men bathed, but our part of the river was just above Bonderoff's gristmill.

I can see the green bank sloping to the water, and the still water sliding down to the sudden swirl and spray of the mill race.

The woods on the bank screened the bathers.

Bathing costumes were simply absent, which caused the mermaids no embarrassment, for they were accustomed to see each other naked in the public hot baths.

They had little fear of intrusion, for the spot was sacred to them.

They splashed about and laughed and played tricks, with streaming hair and free gestures.

I do not know when I saw the girls play as they did in the water.

It was a pretty picture, but the bathers would have been shocked beyond your understanding if you had suggested that naked women might be put into a picture.

If it ever happened, as it happened at least once for me to remember, that their privacy was outraged, the bathers were thrown into a panic as if their very lives were threatened.

Screaming, they huddled together, low in the water, some hiding their eyes in their hands, with the instinct of the ostrich.

Some ran for their clothes on the bank, and stood shrinking behind some inadequate rag.

The more spirited of the naiads threw pebbles at the cowardly intruders, who, safe behind the leafy cover that was meant to shield modesty, threw jeers and mockery in return.

But the Gentile boys ran away soon, or ran away punished.

A chemise and a petticoat turn a frightened woman into an Amazon in such circumstances; and woe to the impudent wretch who lingered after the avengers plunged into the thicket.

Slaps and cuffs at close range were his portion, and curses pursued him in retreat.

Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking;

and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks.

I make no apology to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation of grossness.

I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able.

I

do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist.

The fact is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; and I remember eating with a relish still keener.

Why, I can dream away a half-hour on the immortal flavor of those thick cheese cakes we used to have on Saturday night.

I am no cook, so I cannot tell you how to make such cake.

I might borrow the recipe from my mother, but I would rather you should take my word for the excellence of Polotzk cheese cakes.

If you should attempt that pastry, I am certain, be you ever so clever a cook, you would be disappointed by the result; and hence you might be led to mistrust my reflections and conclusions.

You have nothing in your kitchen cupboard to give the pastry its notable flavor.

It takes history to make such a cake.

First, you must eat it as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights, before the lighting of the week-day lamp.

Then you must have yourself removed from the house of your simple feast, across the oceans, to a land where your cherished pastry is unknown even by name; and where daylight and twilight, work day and fête day, for years rush by you in the unbroken tide of a strange, new, overfull life.

You must abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years,--I think fifteen is the magic number,--and then suddenly, one day, rub the Aladdin's lamp of memory, and have the renowned tidbit whisked upon your platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association.

Do you think all your imported spices, all your scientific blending and manipulating, could produce so fragrant a morsel as that which I have on my tongue as I write?

Glad am I that my mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, has forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery.

At any rate, she does not practise it, and I am the richer in memories for her omissions.

Polotzk cheese cake, as I now know it, has in it the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall; the sweetness of Dvina water; the richness of newly turned earth which I moulded with bare feet and hands; the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place; the fragrance of all my childhood's summers.

Abstinence, as I have mentioned, is one of the essential ingredients in the phantom dish.

I discovered this through a recent experience.

It was cherry time in the country, and the sight of the scarlet fruit suddenly reminded me of a cherry season in Polotzk, I could not say how many years ago.

On that earlier occasion my Cousin Shimke, who, like everybody else, was a storekeeper, had set a boy to watch her store, and me to watch the boy, while she went home to make cherry preserves.

She gave us a basket of cherries for our trouble, and the boy offered to eat them with the stones if I would give him my share.

But I was equal to that feat myself, so we sat down to a cherry-stone contest.

Who ate the most stones I could not remember as I stood under the laden trees not long ago, but the transcendent flavor of the historical cherries came back to me, and I needs must enjoy it once more.

I climbed into the lowest boughs and hung there, eating cherries with the stones, my whole mind concentrated on the sense of taste.

Alas!

the fruit had no such flavor to yield as I sought.

Excellent American cherries were these, but not so fragrantly sweet as my cousin's cherries.

And if I should return to Polotzk, and buy me a measure of cherries at a market stall, and pay for it with a Russian groschen, would the market woman be generous enough to throw in that haunting flavor?

I fear I should find that the old species of cherry is extinct in Polotzk.

Sometimes, when I am not trying to remember at all, I am more fortunate in extracting the flavors of past feasts from my plain American viands.

I was eating strawberries the other day, ripe, red American strawberries.

Suddenly I experienced the very flavor and aroma of some strawberries I ate perhaps twenty years ago.

I started as from a shock, and then sat still for I do not know how long, breathless with amazement.

In the brief interval of a gustatory perception I became a child again, and I positively ached with the pain of being so suddenly compressed to that small being.

I wandered about Polotzk once more, with large, questioning eyes; I rode the Atlantic in an emigrant ship; I took possession of the New World, my ears growing accustomed to a new language; I sat at the feet of renowned professors, till my eyes contracted in dreaming over what they taught; and there I was again, an American among Americans, suddenly made aware of all that I had been, all that I had become--suddenly illuminated, inspired by a complete vision of myself, a daughter of Israel and a child of the universe, that taught me more of the history of my race than ever my learned teachers could understand.

All this came to me in that instant of tasting, all from the flavor of ripe strawberries on my tongue.

Why, then, should I not treasure my memories of childhood feasts?

This experience gives me a great respect for my bread and meat.

I want to taste of as many viands as possible;

for when I sit down to a dish of porridge I am certain of rising again a better animal, and I may rise a wiser man.

I want to eat and drink and be instructed.

Some day I expect to extract from my pudding the flavor of manna which I ate in the desert, and then I shall write you a contemporaneous commentary on the Exodus.

Nor do I despair of remembering yet, over a dish of corn, the time when I fed on worms;

and then I may be able to recall how it felt to be made at last into a man.

Give me to eat and drink, for I crave wisdom.

* * * * * My winters, while I was a very little girl, were passed in comparative confinement.

On account of my delicate health, my grandmother and aunts deemed it wise to keep me indoors; or if I went out, I was so heavily coated and mittened and shawled that the frost scarcely got a chance at the tip of my nose.

I never skated or coasted or built snow houses.

If I had any experience of snowballs, it was with those thrown at me by the Gentile boys.

The way I dodge a snowball to this day makes me certain that I learned the act in my fearful childhood days, when I learned so many cowardly tricks of bending to a blow.

I

know that I was proud of myself when, not many years ago, I found I was not afraid to stand up and catch a flying baseball; but the fear of the snowball I have not conquered.

When I turn a corner in snowball days, the boys with bulging pockets see a head held high and a step unquickened, but I know that I cringe inwardly; and this private mortification I set down against old Polotzk, in my long score of grievances and shames.

Fear is a devil hard to cast out.

Let me make the most of the winter adventures that I recall.

First, there was sleighing.

We never kept horses of our own, but the horses of our customer-guests were always at our disposal, and many a jolly ride they gave us, with the dvornik at the reins, while their owners haggled with my mother in the store about the price of soap.

We had no luxurious sleigh, with cushions and fur robes, no silver bells on our harness.

Ours was a bare sledge used for hauling wood, with a padding of straw and burlap, and the reins, as likely as not, were a knotted rope.

But the horses did fly, over the river and up the opposite bank if we chose; and whether we had bells or not, the merry, foolish heart of Yakub would sing, and the whip would crack, and we children would laugh; and the sport was as good as when, occasionally, we did ride in a more splendid sleigh, loaned us by one of our prouder guests.

We were wholesome as apples to look at when we returned for bread and tea in the dusk; at least I remember my sister, with cheeks as red as a painted doll's under her close-clipped curls; and my little brother, rosy, too, and aristocratic-looking enough, in his little greatcoat tied with a red sash, and little fur cap with earlaps.

For myself, I suppose my nose was purple and my cheeks pinched, just as they are now in the cold weather; but I had a good time.

At certain--I mean uncertain--intervals we were bundled up and marched to the public baths.

This was so great an undertaking, consuming half a day or so, and involving, in winter, such risk of catching cold, that it is no wonder the ceremony was not practised oftener.

The public baths were situated on the river bank.

I always stopped awhile outside, to visit the poor patient horse in the treadmill, by means of which the water was pumped into the baths.

I was not sentimental about animals then.

I had not read of "Black Beauty" or any other personified monsters; I had not heard of any societies for the prevention of cruelty to anything.

But my pity stirred of its own accord at the sight of that miserable brute in the treadmill.

I was used to seeing horses hard-worked and abused.

This horse had no load to make him sweat, and I never saw him whipped.

Yet I pitied this creature.

Round and round his little circle he trod, with head hanging and eyes void of expectation; round and round all day, unthrilled by any touch of rein or bridle, interpreters of a living will; round and round, all solitary, never driven, never checked, never addressed;

round and round and round, a walking machine, with eyes that did not flash, with teeth that did not threaten, with hoofs that did not strike; round and round the dull day long.

I knew what a horse's life should be, entangled with the life of a master: adventurous, troubled, thrilled; petted and opposed, loved and abused; to-day the ringing city pavement underfoot, and the buzz of beasts and men in the market place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the lone whinny of scattered mates.

How empty the existence of the treadmill horse beside this!

As empty and endless and dull as the life of almost any woman in Polotzk, had I had eyes to see the likeness.

But to my ablutions!

We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished only with benches around the walls.

There is no screen or other protection against the drafts rushing in every time the door is opened.

When we enter the bathing-room we are confused by a babel of sounds--shrill voices of women, hoarse voices of attendants, wailing and yelping of children, and rushing of water.

At the same time we are smitten by the heat of the room and nearly suffocated by clouds of steam.

We find at last an empty bench, and surround ourselves with a semicircle of wooden pails, collected from all around the room.

Sometimes two women in search of pails lay hold of the same pail at the same moment, and a wrangle ensues, in the course of which each disputant reminds the other of all her failings, nicknames, and undesirable connections, living, dead, and unborn; until an attendant interferes, with more muscle than argument, punctuating the sentence of justice with newly coined expletives suggested by the occasion.

The centre of the room, where the bathers fill their pails at the faucets, is a field of endless battle, especially on a crowded day.

The peaceful women seated within earshot stop their violent scrubbing, to the relief of unwilling children, while they attend to the liveliest of the quarrels.

I like to watch the _poll_, that place of torture and heroic endurance.

It is a series of steps rising to the ceiling, affording a gradually mounting temperature.

The bather who wants to enjoy a violent sweating rests full length for a few minutes on each step, while an attendant administers several hearty strokes of a stinging besom.

Sometimes a woman climbs too far, and is brought down in a faint.

On the poll, also, the cupping is done.

The back of the patient, with the cups in even rows, looks to me like a muffin pan.

Of course I never go on the poll: I am not robust enough.

My spankings I take at home.

Another centre of interest is the _mikweh_, the name of which it is indelicate to mention in the hearing of men.

It is a large pool of standing water, its depth graded by means of a flight of steps.

Every married woman must perform here certain ceremonious ablutions at regular intervals.

Cleanliness is as strictly enjoined as godliness, and the manner of attaining it is carefully prescribed.

The women are prepared by the attendants for entering the pool, the curious children looking on.

In the pool they are ducked over their heads the correct number of times.

The water in the pool has been standing for days; it does not look nor smell fresh.

But we had no germs in Polotzk, so no harm came of it, any more than of the pails used promiscuously by feminine Polotzk.

If any were so dainty as to have second thoughts about the use of the common bath, they could enjoy, for a fee of twenty-five kopecks, a private bathtub in another part of the building.

For the rich there were luxuries even in Polotzk.

Cleansed, red-skinned, and steaming, we return at last to the dressing-room, to shiver, as we dress, in the cold drafts from the entry door; and then, muffled up to the eyes, we plunge into the refreshing outer air, and hurry home, looking like so many big bundles running away with smaller bundles.

If we meet acquaintances on the way we are greeted with "_zu refueh_" ("to your good health").

If the first man we meet is a Gentile, the women who have been to the mikweh have to return and repeat the ceremony of purification.

To prevent such a calamity, the kerchief is worn hooded over the eyes, so as to exclude unholy sights.

At home we are indulged with extra pieces of cake for tea, and otherwise treated like heroes returned from victory.

We narrate anecdotes of our expedition, and my mother complains that my little brother is getting too old to be taken to the women's bath.

He will go hereafter with the men.

[Illustration: THE MEAT MARKET, POLOTZK] My winter confinement was not shared by my older sister, who otherwise was my constant companion.

She went out more than I, not being so afraid of the cold.

She used to fret so when my mother was away in the store that it became a custom for her to accompany my mother from the time she was a mere baby.

Muffled and rosy and frost-bitten, the tears of cold rolling unnoticed down her plump cheeks, she ran after my busy mother all day long, or tumbled about behind the counter, or nestled for a nap among the bulging sacks of oats and barley.

She warmed her little hands over my mother's pot of glowing charcoal--there was no stove in the store--and even learned to stand astride of it, for further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire.

Fetchke was like a young colt inseparable from the mare.

I make this comparison not in disrespectful jest, but in deepest pity.

Fetchke kept close to my mother at first for love and protection, but the petting she got became a blind for discipline.

She learned early, from my mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for labor.

She learned to bow to the yoke, to lift burdens, to do more for others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn.

She learned to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share.

When she was only fit to nurse her dolls, she learned how to comfort a weary heart.