a _Chevrah_, the number of places of worship
having been indefinitely increased to accommodate those who made their
appearance for this occasion only.

Everywhere friends and neighbors were asking one another how they were
bearing the fast, exhibiting their white tongues and generally comparing
symptoms, the physical aspects of the Day of Atonement more or less
completely diverting attention from the spiritual. Smelling-salts passed
from hand to hand, and men explained to one another that, but for the
deprivation of their cigars, they could endure _Yom Kippur_ with
complacency.

Esther passed the Ghetto school, within which free services were going
on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically
observant, fore-gathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and without
which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of tune with
religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day to stay
entirely away. From the interior came from sunrise to nightfall a
throbbing thunder of supplication, now pealing in passionate outcry, now
subsiding to a low rumble. The sounds of prayer that pervaded the
Ghetto, and burst upon her at every turn, wrought upon Esther strangely;
all her soul went out in sympathy with these yearning outbursts; she
stopped every now and then to listen, as in those far-off days when the
Sons of the Covenant drew her with their melancholy cadences.

At last, moved by an irresistible instinct, she crossed the threshold of
a large _Chevrah_ she had known in her girlhood, mounted the stairs and
entered the female compartment without hostile challenge. The reek of
many breaths and candles nearly drove her back, but she pressed forwards
towards a remembered window, through a crowd of be-wigged women, shaking
their bodies fervently to and fro.

This room had no connection with the men's; it was simply the room above
part of theirs, and the declamations of the unseen cantor came but
faintly through the flooring, though the clamor of the general masculine
chorus kept the pious _au courant_ with their husbands. When weather or
the whims of the more important ladies permitted, the window at the end
was opened; it gave upon a little balcony, below which the men's chamber
projected considerably, having been built out into the back yard. When
this window was opened simultaneously with the skylight in the men's
synagogue, the fervid roulades of the cantor were as audible to the
women as t