EEB SHL01MEH 329
and it was arranged that every day for an hour and a half the teacher should read to him and explain the sciences. To begin with, Eeb Shloimeh chose physiology, sociology, and mathematical geography.
Days, weeks, and months have gone by, and Eeb Shloimeh has become depressed, very depressed. He does not sleep at night, he has lost his appetite, doesn't care to talk to people.
Bad, bitter thoughts oppress him.
For seventy years he had not only known nothing, but, on the contrary, he had known everything wrong, understood head downwards. And it seemed to him that if he had known in his youth what he knew now, he would have lived differently, that his years would have been useful to others.
He could find no stain on his life it was one long record of deeds of charity; but they appeared to him now so insignificant, so useless, and some of them even mischievous. Looking round him, he saw no traces of them left. The rich man of whom he used to beg donations is no poorer for them, and the pauper for whom he begged them is the same pauper as before. It is true, he had always thought of the paupers as sacks full of holes, and had only stuffed things into them because he had a soft heart, and could not bear to see a look of disappointment, or a tear rolling down the pale cheek of a hungry pauper. His own little world, as he had found it and as it was now, seemed to him much worse than before, in spite of all the good things he had done in it.
