E was old and feeble, and tottering in his gait; and it tells its own little story when it is recorded that the neighbors prefixed his name with "Uncle" instead of "Granda”.”

The one is a form of appellation selfsuggested at sight, and all a man needs to do to earn it is to look old enough; the other reflects a certain warmth of feeling gradually grown out of grateful association.

"Uncle Jay" the women and the children called him. The men, however, with that strain of irreverence that ever runs through the sex, often referred to him as "Uncle Jehovah." Still, they always hastened to help him across the

street.

Jerucham was his real name-Jerucham Markovitz, in full. He had lived long enough in this country to have had. it Americanized into Jermyn Morecombe, or Jerold Morgan. But he was contemptuous of superficialities, and under his searching, analytical, and often cynical mind no make-believes could endure or come into being.

You could see him day by day bending over a lathe in his Harlem basement, filing and pinching and turning and hammering. He was dressed invariably in an ancient Prince Albert coat, threadbare in parts and grease-crusted in other parts. A tapering, velvet skull-cap sat lightly on his massive head, accentuating the breadth of his furrowed forehead. All about him there was a confusion of legless chairs and tables, drawerless bureaus and dressers, disemboweled, old-time table pianos, derelict picture-frames, and great rings of rusty keys.

He kept a second-hand furniture store and did odd repairing jobs-that was what the neighbors had to tell about him in general. And also they would tell you that he was a nice, good-humored old man

who loved to crack jokes with everybody. in his broken, misapplied English.

He seldom sold anything except when a man came in to match a key or select some old tools. But there was ever a rush of things to be repaired. The women brought him their clocks, their eggbeaters, and their baby-carriages; and the children came fast with their mechanical toys and their coasters; and everything had to be done well and conscientiously, and it took time-much time.

Jerucham delighted in mechanics and mechanisms. In his younger days his mind had been running largely on inventing, and he was then a familiar figure to the doorkeepers at the Patent Office in Washington. Amid the dust, back of that conglomeration of pieces of old furniture, there still lay rolls of sectional drawings. for anti-nicotine pipes, self-extinguishing gas-burners, safety-revolvers, noiseless. street-car wheels, and many such like promising and long-waited-for innovations. At one time he had been very near acquiring a fortune from the British postmaster-general for devising a pillar box that would leave it impossible for letters. to be abstracted by means of the birdlimed stick or by any other manner of means. And still to this moment Jerucham had not yielded up all hope of finally realizing the great perpetual-motion idea. Still awaiting completion, amid those rolls of drawings, lay the bulky work he had written on the subject in small, close Hebrew script.

Now at his high old age, Jerucham was given to sermonizing over his labors. And when he worked three days over a sixtyfive-cent clock, and gave it back to its owner in perfect order in consideration of a dime, Jerucham was still the gainer.

"Humph," he would say, filing down the other seventy-nine cogs in the wheel to make them even with the one worn

away or broken off, "I rub, rub, rubwhat do I do? Nothing. I make dust, -little grains of dust,-then it goes. It turns and it ticks and it goes; a little rod moves, and it points, such a figure and such a figure; then the children of the earth come and look. They look and say it's time to do this, it 's time to do that; it 's time to go here, it 's time to go there. They rush, they scamper, they run. Gewalt! gewalt! Man, man, man, child of earth, where do you run? What for? Vanity! vanity! vanity! They think they know. They think big. The little brass rod stands at such a figure; they say the Isun and the earth stand so and so; the little brass rod stands so and so; the sun and the earth keep with it. Time, time, time, they call it; such a piece of time and such a piece of time. What 's time? What 's time? Where 's time? Babble and vanity and darkness and arrogance! We think we know things, we think we do things. I rub a little, I make dust a little, and tomorrow, when the wheel turns and the little rod points, I come and shake my finger at the sun and the earth, and I say, 'Ha, I make you move, I make you go!' Gewalt! gewalt! Tpui!"

His indignation at man's extravagant estimate of himself and his place in the universe took Jerucham's breath away, and he cut it all short by spitting on the floor.

In the evening you found Jerucham the central figure of an admiring, and often a spellbound, audience of graybeards, in the synagogue, as he expounded to them, from his place at the head of the long, narrow table, some intricate passage in the Talmud. Sometimes, in less formal circumstances, he had them stand round him in a cluster while he regaled their thirsty souls with his own heaven-inspired interpretation of some obscure diction in the Pentateuch, the stumbling-block of ages. It was the latest come to him during the day. For, back of that decrepit. furniture pile where he had his livingroom, Jerucham devoted a deal of his time to the writing of a commentary on Moses; and he kept it double-locked in at

drawer consecrated to itself-the holiest of holy.

The men hung open-mouthed upon his words, and they called him "Reb" Jerucham, and when he went away they shook their heads mournfully after him and said:

"Pity! pity! A thousand times pity! If that man had given his years to the study of the word instead of buying and selling and the thinking out of toy wares, he would have been the great light of the diaspora. The world would have been ringing of him."

One day Jerucham was busy over a small gramophone. A fresh needle was all that was wanting, but the woman was new to the toy, and did not understand it, and so she took it over to Uncle Jay to set it right for her. Jerucham located the defect at a glance; but he kept the machine for several days, for he wanted to pull the thing to pieces and follow up the principles of its workings as one whole.

He was holding up to the light the cylindrical record, studying its tracings. And that was what Jerucham wanted to get at the very soul of the thing.

"Gewalt! gewalt! Man! man! man!" he commented, "he talks big, he thinks big. He wrenches secrets' from nature, he makes nature 'do his bidding.' Tpui! What does man do? Nothing, nothing. A little ant that takes from one hole and carries into another. Nature is there, always, always the same, always ready to do things, and it is all an open book. There was the same air and the same wax to form records of what Moses and the prophets said to the people. And now the children of the earth come and say they 've 'wrenched it' from nature. Bah! God and Columbus made the world. God made Asia and Africa and Europe, and Columbus made America! Gewalt! gewalt! gewalt! Tpui! tpui!"

"For why are you angry?
- ?”

It was a fresh, bright voice, full of music and innocent wonderment.

Jerucham looked up, and saw before him a boy of five, straight and slim, beau

tiful of face, and with limbs of delicate. mold. He seemed different from the rest of the children in the neighborhood. He looked an exotic.

A red patch showed at Jerucham's cheek-bones. It was the coloring of delight. His sense for beauty was deeply stirred. His mouth opened into a smile, and his head moved gently from side to side.

"Ah!" he uttered under his breath, in tender admiration. "Vat your name?" he presently addressed the boy.

"Joseph," was the answer, the large brown eyes steadily fixed on the old man. "Joseph," Jerucham repeated to himself. "That's correct. That's how the first Joseph must have looked when a man such as his father could not help favoring him above the other eleven. Nu," he presently added aloud to the boy, "vat you got, Joey?"

He held out his hand, believing that the little visitor had brought him something to mend.

"Mama says I must n't be called 'Joey,' and also not Joe,'" the child returned, "because-because I must be called 'Joseph.' And my other name is Thorpe."

"Nu, all right. Vat you got for me, Joseph ?"

“Oh, I got nothing-nothing," Joseph answered haltingly, wondering what sort of tribute was expected of him for setting his foot in that basement. "I only-only come in."

"Vere you live, Joseph?"

"I live in One Hundred and Twentieth Street, and mama says I am not to say anything to the boys in the street; and papa will be coming home soon all right, in a-in a more month, maybe."

"Vatsemerra mit your papa?"

"Nothing; only he 's away-away, and he 'll be coming back all right soon. And Mrs. Berg puts me to bed every night— e-v-e-r-y night, because mama has to be out playing."

connect it with playing. Presently he said aloud in open astonishment:

"Don't you know mama?"

Joseph could not imagine that there was anybody in New York that did not know his mama.

"How 's teddy-bear?" Jerucham asked. "Gut? Not vant mend?"

"Oh, my teddy-bear is all right, thank you, and I can make him sit up by himself. See? But could you make my sword real, real sharp? And won't Ican't I chop off heads then?"

Joseph had come in hugging to his breast a big brown teddy-bear, while a crude wooden sword, the handiwork of Mr. Berg, the husband of the landlady, was stuck in his patent-leather belt.

In his solitary perambulations up and down the street Joseph was seldom seen without these two possessions of his. The rest of the children were keen on the incongruity, and the sword so accentuated the teddy-bear as to stamp Joseph a "sissie." But you, who owe no grudge to Joseph for his aloofness, remembering especially that he acted on strict orders from his mama, will readily see in the sword and the teddy-bear the one complete whole. For there never was warrior, with real sword, doing real killing, that had not something tender hugging to his breast. Only he would not let you see it.

Jerucham took the sword from Joseph and looked it over. There was some writing in pencil about the handle, and Jerucham's eye settled on that.

Joseph stared. "Actress" was a new word to him, and he did not know how to

a careless contempt for the science of language, which was no science at all. It was a thing of convention, and it did not