het_, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and
the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men
who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the
earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who
ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society.
Those who kneaded the toothsome "bolas" lie with those who ate them; and
the marriage-brokers repose with those they mated. The olives and the
cucumbers grow green and fat as of yore, but their lovers are mixed with
a soil that is barren of them. The restless, bustling crowds that
jostled laughingly in Rag Fair are at rest in the "House of Life;" the
pageant of their strenuous generation is vanished as a dream. They died
with the declaration of God's unity on their stiffening lips, and the
certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew
inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their
only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust.
Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind
eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past,
hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet
with the pathos sanctifying the joys that have been.

BOOK I.

CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.

CHAPTER I.

THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION.

A dead and gone wag called the street "Fashion Street," and most of the
people who live in it do not even see the joke. If it could exchange
names with "Rotten Row," both places would be more appropriately
designated. It is a dull, squalid, narrow thoroughfare in the East End
of London, connecting Spitalfields with Whitechapel, and branching off
in blind alleys. In the days when little Esther Ansell trudged its
unclean pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the
blasphemies from some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in
the capital of the civilized world. Some of these clotted spiders'-webs
have since been swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the
spiders have scurried off into darker crannies.

There were the conventional touches about the London street-picture, as
Esther Ansell sped through the freezing mist of the December evening,
with a pitcher in her hand, looking in her oriental coloring like a
miniature of Rebecca going to the well. A female street-singer, with a
trail of infants of dubious m