fe's
sweetest blessings on the pair! The marriage will take place in the
Fall." Esther dried her eyes and determined to be present at the
ceremony. It is so grateful to the hesitant soul to be presented with a
landmark. There was nothing to be gained now by arriving before the
marriage; nay, her arrival just in time for it would clench the
festivities. Meantime she attached herself to Hannah's charitable
leading-strings, alternately attracted to the Children of the Ghetto by
their misery, and repulsed by their failings. She seemed to see them now
in their true perspective, correcting the vivid impressions of childhood
by the insight born of wider knowledge of life. The accretion of pagan
superstition was greater than she had recollected. Mothers averted
fever by a murmured charm and an expectoration, children in new raiment
carried bits of coal or salt in their pockets to ward off the evil-eve.
On the other hand, there was more resourcefulness, more pride of
independence. Her knowledge of Moses Ansell had misled her into too
sweeping a generalization. And she was surprised to realize afresh how
much illogical happiness flourished amid penury, ugliness and pain.
After school-hours the muggy air vibrated with the joyous laughter of
little children, tossing their shuttlecocks, spinning their tops,
turning their skipping-ropes, dancing to barrel-organs or circling
hand-in-hand in rings to the sound of the merry traditional chants of
childhood. Esther often purchased a pennyworth of exquisite pleasure by
enriching some sad-eyed urchin. Hannah (whose own scanty surplus was
fortunately augmented by an anonymous West-End Reform Jew, who
employed her as his agent) had no prepossessions to correct, no
pendulum-oscillations to distract her, no sentimental illusions to
sustain her. She knew the Ghetto as it was; neither expected gratitude
from the poor, nor feared she might "pauperize them," knowing that the
poor Jew never exchanges his self-respect for respect for his
benefactor, but takes by way of rightful supplement to his income. She
did not drive families into trickery, like ladies of the West, by being
horrified to find them eating meat. If she presided at a stall at a
charitable sale of clothing, she was not disheartened if articles were
snatched from under her hand, nor did she refuse loans because borrowers
sometimes merely used them to evade the tallyman by getting their
jewelry at cash prices. She not only gave alms to t