84 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
And while they prayed and feasted, and slept and ate and drank in security Moses and his wife and servant, and the stranger within his gates the storm of civil and unholy strife, the red waves of persecution passed over Czarovna like a blight from hell. Helpless women and children fell before the lust and savagery of ignorance, fanaticism, blood-guiltiness, and revenge. Once more the cruel fate of their predecessors of Egypt had sought out the Israelites in this remote corner of the world, and they were beaten with many stripes, tortured with rod and fire, their house- hold goods taken from them, their altars and shrines desolated, their numbers decimated with fire and sword. Czarovna was almost wiped from the face of the earth. In the daytime the ghetto resounded with cries of death and yells of drunken vengeance. At night the red cock crowed over the long street, and flamed high above the eaves and chimneys of the home of the Klosstocks. And when the work of desolation came to an end, the country round about was filled with houseless Jews seeking the shelter of wood and forest, making their way to the river that held its course through hostile town and village to the distant sea.
The historian's duty in regard to this part of his narrative is complete with the simple record of the sack and burning of Czarovna, and the intimation that out of this flame and smoke of desolation came forth at last safe through the furnace Andrea Ferrari, Moses Grunstein, his wife and servant. How Ferrari eventually made his way through the spies and police of Russia is not a matter of so much account as what he did with his liberty, which it will be the business of the narrator to set forth in future chapters ; but it is important to relate that he left Anna Klosstock a miserable wreck in the Christian hospital at Czarovna, subject to the treatment of local medical science, which prided itself on the roughest and readiest means of curing
