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No. 41. — Vienna, 9 October 1903 — 18 Tishri 5664. — 7th Year.

Autumn Melodies.

For the Feast of Tabernacles.

Dedicated to Basia.

It was a clear, moonlit night. Blue and transparent the warm, moist air. A still wind stroked the trees tenderly and softly, and they shook their foliage gladly and gaily; balmy fragrances drifted from the trees into the wide distance, heavenward ...

It was autumn, a mild, tranquil autumn of the warm lands. The earth rested, men rested, and the sun too was weary from its strenuous summer labour and rested, mild and gentle ... People clad in white, decked out for the festival, came up the high road from their villages and fields to the holy city of Jerusalem. They were celebrating the end of labour and the beginning of rest; they were celebrating their harvest festival. With wreaths of vine-leaves upon their heads, youths and maidens went before and sang, with the exuberant strength of their youth, the Song of Songs, the song of labour and of life. The calloused hands that had swung the scythe were raised vigorously and nimbly; the bent backs, scorched by the sun and bowed down by toil, straightened themselves — man awoke, joyous, strong, intoxicated with the senses — the Dionysian man. And far and wide through the valleys and hills of Judaea rang the Evoë, and the ground resounded beneath the steps of the strong and the beautiful — and far away echoed the sound of their song — of their frenzied round-dance. And the moon smiled gently and kindly, and the trees shook their crowns in a shudder of delight, and red and golden leaves fell to the earth and covered like a carpet the ground before the proud and strong children of men who were celebrating the autumn. And they had a right to rejoice, for they had harrowed and sown and reaped, for they had enjoyed the spring and the summer, they had drunk in long draughts from the cup of life, of the healthy life of labour, and they lived strong and glad in the midst of Nature.

That was once thy autumn festival, O thou my old, poor, thou my beloved people!

*

A raw, northern autumn night. A leaden sky; heavy, black, terrifying clouds piling up like spectres overhead; heavy drops fall upon the earth. The wind howls, and the withered trees shake their tops, and yellow, faded, dead leaves fall upon the damp earth and plunge into the puddles. It is a lonely high road. Only somewhere in the distance is a barking heard, is seen, like a fading gleam, a little flame — perhaps a will-o'-the-wisp, perhaps the solitary light of a farmhouse or a watchman's hut. And figures, young and old, all black and bowed, creep along the way, listening fearfully for every sound, trembling and starting at every rustle of the leaves; a nervous twitching and a nameless anguish shake their limbs at the mere sound of their own hurried footsteps in the dreadful stillness. And suddenly there rings out in the distance a shrill, frantic scream, a terrible cry for help, the death-cry of one impaled, the cry of terror of a violated maiden. Oh, they know, these lonely, sombre figures, for whom this cry is meant and from whose breast it was wrung. They are themselves fugitives; they have heard this cry close at hand with their own ears; they saw with their own eyes how those dearest to them were cruelly tortured and killed, how their children were torn asunder, their wives, daughters and brides dishonoured and murdered. Oh, it is known to them, this cry of despair, of blood, that calls to Heaven for vengeance. They know it. Another Kishineff, a new Homel — new victims, new corpses, the mutilated, the maltreated, the plundered, here and there in the Tartar steppes and on the Pruth, in Galicia and in Ireland. In every quarter of the globe heaven and earth have heard it, this cry of terror, this song of death — all nations have seen and shed Jewish blood, all have it upon their hands and upon their consciences — and the Jewish people journeys on, wanders restlessly, without repose, upon dark, rough paths, a leaden, cruel, cloud-laden autumn sky above it and a heart-numbing desolation before and behind it. And its only song, the only one it can still sing, is the frenzied note of pain, the