The Maccabaean

WHENEVER he thinks of his mother's lullabies, tears rise to his eyes. Thehe was nothing wonderful in them. Not at all; though he ofter cried because there were no new ones. Now, when the years have covered him with their grayness, when he is bound to the wheel of life and cannot extricate himself from it, and does not try to, and sadly has accepted his place among men, to keep tune with the everlasting lock-step of the human race; now, he sits back and recalls his mother's lullabies, with a sadness he cannot explain.

It may be because these lullabies contain the essence of the spirit which never dies, the spirit of, motherhood. Though sung over his cradle, he feels sometimes that they may not have been meant for him; they sustained a note which, when translated into prose, is the question which every mother has at one time or another addressed to the Sphinx: “What is the destiny of this child of mine?”

His mother was the mother of a brood of children who had shared in her love. Perhaps, when he recalls her songs, a picture rises before him of his brothers and sisters, who also have left their impress upon his mother's heart. Like all mothers, she was made by all her children. Where are they now; Archie, the fairhaired; where is Ezra and little Mary? And how have the lives of the others unravelled from the spool of time? Archie's grave overlooks the river; it is the Mecca of the one pilgrimage his mother makes; see her stealing over to the cemetery, on the

Fast of Ab. Since his death and the breaking up of the home —as all homes must disintegrate in the course of time—she sings the same old cradle songs, but a vision of that little grave presses against her heart and her voice trembles. If Joey could only hush that tremolo in her voice! He hears in it the eternal longing of the mother for happiness for all her children; for the weakest and the bravest; for the most timid and the least successful, as well as for the one who wrests victory from life. The quaver in her voice is the epitome of all her experiences as mother.

Joey often thought he heard in it an echo of her own childhood, echoes of her own beginning; then he felt peculiarly in love with her. He saw her with her girl friends in the far off country, romping in the fields, marching out in company to the potato patch. They sang Polist songs as they went along the road, arm in arm. The mother, standing on the threshold, shading her eyes, wanted them to return before nightfall. In the field they walked and gamboled, picked flowers, sang and laughed immoderately, as girls do. They returned home as their father left for the synagogue.

There are lyrics born of a fleeting mood (Joey has sung them), but there are others that have the fragrance of an old perfume which has been kept sweet in the wrappings of age. These are the melodies that hark back to other currents of life, and speak not of your own experiences, but of the wonderful story of your people, oppressed through centuries of woe. Necessarily, the songs of woe are in the minor key, for they dare not raise their heads exultingly.