s, saints,
publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors,
foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank. _Nihil
alienum a se Judaeus putat_.

Joe and his friend fell to recalling Dutch Sam's great feats. Each
out-vied the other in admiration for the supreme pugilist.

Next day Sleepy Sol came rampaging down the courtyard. He walked at the
rate of five miles to the hour, and despite the weight of his bag his
head pointed to the zenith.

"Clo'!" he shrieked. "Clo'!"

Joe the hostler came out. His head was bandaged, and in his hand was
gold lace. It was something even to do business with a hero's
father-in-law.

But it is given to few men to marry their daughters to champion boxers:
and as Dutch Sam was not a Don Quixote, the average peddler or huckster
never enjoyed the luxury of prancing gait and cock-a-hoop business cry.
The primitive fathers of the Ghetto might have borne themselves more
jauntily had they foreseen that they were to be the ancestors of mayors
and aldermen descended from Castilian hidalgos and Polish kings, and
that an unborn historian would conclude that the Ghetto of their day was
peopled by princes in disguise. They would have been as surprised to
learn who they were as to be informed that they were orthodox. The great
Reform split did not occur till well on towards the middle of the
century, and the Jews of those days were unable to conceive that a man
could be a Jew without eating _kosher_ meat, and they would have looked
upon the modern distinctions between racial and religious Jews as the
sophistries of the convert or the missionary. If their religious life
converged to the Great _Shool_, their social life focussed on Petticoat
Lane, a long, narrow thoroughfare which, as late as Strype's day, was
lined with beautiful trees: vastly more pleasant they must have been
than the faded barrows and beggars of after days. The Lane--such was its
affectionate sobriquet--was the stronghold of hard-shell Judaism, the
Alsatia of "infidelity" into which no missionary dared set foot,
especially no apostate-apostle. Even in modern days the new-fangled
Jewish minister of the fashionable suburb, rigged out, like the
Christian clergyman, has been mistaken for such a _Meshumad_, and pelted
with gratuitous vegetables and eleemosynary eggs. The Lane was always
the great market-place, and every insalubrious street and alley abutting
on it was covered with the overflowings of its c