postal service was slow and intermittent. People came and went less often, a journey was a great undertaking, and there were not many outsiders to be found even in the larger towns. Every town was a town to itself, apart, and Pumpian constituted a little world of its own, which had nothing to do with the world at large, and lived its own life.
Neither were there so many newspapers then, anywhere, to muddle people's heads every day of the week, stirring up questions, so that people should have something to talk about, and the Jews had no papers of their own at all, and only heard "news" and "what was going on in the world" in the house-of-study or (lehavdil!) in the bath-house. And what sort of news was it then? What sort could it be? World-stirring questions hardly existed (certainly Pumpian was ignorant of them): politics, economics, statistics, capital, social problems, all these words, now on the lips of every boy and girl, were then all but unknown even in the great world, let alone among us Jews, and let alone to Reb Nochumtzi, the Pumpian Rav!
And yet Reb Nochumtzi had a certain amount of worldly wisdom of his own.
Reb Nochumtzi was a native of Pumpian, and had inherited his position there from his father. He had been an only son, made much of by his parents (hence the pet name Nochumtzi clinging to him even in his old age), and never let out of their sight. When he had grown up, they connected him by marriage with the tenant of an estate not far from the town, but his father would not hear of his going there "auf Köst,"
