his bolas and his jam-puffs, and his cheese-cakes for unleavened
"palavas," and worsted balls and almond cakes. Time was when the
Passover dietary was restricted to fruit and meat and vegetables, but
year by year the circle is expanding, and it should not be beyond the
reach of ingenuity to make bread itself Passoverian. It is now that the
pious shopkeeper whose store is tainted with leaven sells his business
to a friendly Christian, buying it back at the conclusion of the
festival. Now the Shalotten _Shammos_ is busy from morning to night
filling up charity-forms, artistically multiplying the poor man's
children and dividing his rooms. Now is holocaust made of a people's
bread-crumbs, and now is the national salutation changed to "How do the
_Motsos_ agree with you?" half of the race growing facetious, and the
other half finical over the spotted Passover cakes.

It was on the evening preceding the opening of Passover that Esther
Ansell set forth to purchase a shilling's worth of fish in Petticoat
Lane, involuntarily storing up in her mind vivid impressions of the
bustling scene. It is one of the compensations of poverty that it allows
no time for mourning. Daily duty is the poor man's nepenthe.

Esther and her father were the only two members of the family upon whom
the death of Benjamin made a deep impression. He had been so long away
from home that he was the merest shadow to the rest. But Moses bore the
loss with resignation, his emotions discharging themselves in the daily
_Kaddish_. Blent with his personal grief was a sorrow for the
commentaries lost to Hebrew literature by his boy's premature
transference to Paradise. Esther's grief was more bitter and defiant.
All the children were delicate, but it was the first time death had
taken one. The meaningless tragedy of Benjamin's end shook the child's
soul to its depths. Poor lad! How horrible to be lying cold and ghastly
beneath the winter snow! What had been the use of all his long prepay
rations to write great novels? The name of Ansell would now become
ingloriously extinct. She wondered whether _Our Own_ would collapse and
secretly felt it must. And then what of the hopes of worldly wealth she
had built on Benjamin's genius? Alas! the emancipation of the Ansells
from the yoke of poverty was clearly postponed. To her and her alone
must the family now look for deliverance. Well, she would take up the
mantle of the dead boy, and fill it as best she might. She clench