THE LAST OF THEM 569
Then, if once in a long, long while the rich Volhynian householder stumbled, by some miracle or other, into Lithuania, sheer curiosity would drive him to take a look at the Lithuanian celebrity. But he would stand before him in trembling and astonishment, as one stands before a high granite rock, the summit of which can barely be discerned. Is he terrified by the dark and bushy brows, the keen, penetrating looks, the deep, stern wrinkles in the forehead that might have been carved in stone, they are so stiffly fixed? Who can say? Or is he put out of countenance by the cold, hard assertiveness of their speech, which bores into the conscience like a gimlet, and knows of no mercy ? for from between those wrinkles, from beneath those dark brows, shines out the everlasting glory of the Shechinah.
Such were the celebrated Eabbonim of Mouravanke.
They were an old family, a long chain of great men, generation on generation of tall, well-built, large-boned Jews, all far on in years, with thick, curly beards. It was very seldom one of these beards showed a silver hair. They were stern, silent men, who heard and saw everything, but who expressed themselves mostly by means of their wrinkles and their eyebrows rather than in words, so that when a Mouravanke Rav went so far as to say "N-nu," that was enough.
The dignity of Eav was hereditary among them, descending from father to son, and, together with the Rabbinical position and the eighteen gulden a week salary, the sou inherited from his father a tall, old read- ing-desk, smoked and scorched by the candles, in the old
