till two o'clock on the Great White Fast when she was seven years old
and accomplished the perfect feat at nine. When she read a simple little
story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which the
cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish
and dutiful determinations. She had something of the temperament of the
stoic, fortified by that spiritual pride which does not look for equal
goodness in others; and though she disapproved of Solomon's dodgings of
duty, she did not sneak or preach, even gave him surreptitious crusts of
bread before he had said his prayers, especially on Saturdays and
Festivals when the praying took place in _Shool_ and was liable to be
prolonged till mid-day.

Esther often went to synagogue and sat in the ladies' compartment. The
drone of the "Sons of the Covenant" downstairs was part of her
consciousness of home, like the musty smell of the stairs, or Becky's
young men through whom she had to plough her way when she went for the
morning milk, or the odors of Mr. Belcovitch's rum or the whirr of his
machines, or the bent, snuffy personality of the Hebrew scholar in the
adjoining garret, or the dread of Dutch Debby's dog that was ultimately
transformed to friendly expectation. Esther led a double life, just as
she spoke two tongues. The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose
people had had a special history, was always at the back of her
consciousness; sometimes it was brought to the front by the scoffing
rhymes of Christian children, who informed her that they had stuck a
piece of pork upon a fork and given it to a member of her race.

But far more vividly did she realize that she was an English girl; far
keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and
Wellington; she rejoiced to find that her ancestors had always beaten
the French from the days of Cressy and Poictiers to the days of
Waterloo, that Alfred the Great was the wisest of kings, and that
Englishmen dominated the world and had planted colonies in every corner
of it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men
speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs, and
everything worth inventing. Esther absorbed these ideas from the school
reading books. The experience of a month will overlay the hereditary
bequest of a century. And yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains
most sensitive to the old impressions.

Sarah and Isaac had devel