200 ROSENTHAL
been bumped on the shoulder by a Gentile going past me with a horse is that a dream? But if the whole world is taking part in the fair, it's evidently the proper thing to do ... " Meanwhile he was watching a peasant with a horse, and he liked the look of the horse so much that he bought it and mounted it. And he looked at it from where he sat astride, and saw the horse was a horse, but at the selfsame time it was Moisheh Chalfon as well. Berel wondered: how is it possible for it to be at once a horse and a man? But his own eyes told him it was so. He wanted to dis- mount, but the horse bears him to a shop. Here he climbed down and asked for a pound of sugar. Berel kept his eyes on the scales, and a fresh surprise ! Where they should have been weighing sugar, they were weigh- ing his good and bad deeds. And the two scales were nearly equally laden, and oscillated up and down in the air . . .
Suddenly they threw a sheet of paper into the scale that held his bad deeds. Berel looked to see it was the hundred-ruble-note which he had appropriated at Moisheh Chalfon's! But it was now much larger, bordered with black, and the letters and numbers were red as fire. The piece of paper was frightfully heavy, it was all two men could do to carry it to the weighing- machine, and when they had thrown it with all their might onto the scale, something snapped, and the scale went down, down, down.
At that moment a man sleeping at Berel's head stretched out a foot, and gave Berel a kick in the head. Berel awoke.
