tibbur's_ a lot of _Gelt."_

"Are you a-going?" cried Abraham in a terrible rage. "Ten bob's my price
now."

"Avroomkely, _noo, zoog_ (say now)! Fourteenpence 'apenny. I am a poor
voman. Here, fifteenpence."

Abraham seized her by the shoulders and pushed her towards the wall,
where she cursed picturesquely. Esther thought it was a bad time to
attempt to get her own shilling's worth--she fought her way towards
another fishmonger.

There was a kindly, weather-beaten old fellow with whom Esther had often
chaffered job-lots when fortune smiled on the Ansells. Him, to her joy,
Esther perceived--she saw a stack of gurnards on his improvised slab,
and in imagination smelt herself frying them. Then a great shock as of a
sudden icy douche traversed her frame, her heart seemed to stand still.
For when she put her hand to her pocket to get her purse, she found but
a thimble and a slate-pencil and a cotton handkerchief. It was some
minutes before she could or would realize the truth that the four and
sevenpence halfpenny on which so much depended was gone. Groceries and
unleavened cakes Charity had given, raisin wine had been preparing for
days, but fish and meat and all the minor accessories of a well-ordered
Passover table--these were the prey of the pickpocket. A blank sense of
desolation overcame the child, infinitely more horrible than that which
she felt when she spilled the soup; the gurnards she could have touched
with her finger seemed far off, inaccessible; in a moment more they and
all things were blotted out by a hot rush of tears, and she was jostled
as in a dream hither and thither by the double stream of crowd. Nothing
since the death of Benjamin had given her so poignant a sense of the
hollowness and uncertainty of existence. What would her father say,
whose triumphant conviction that Providence had provided for his
Passover was to be so rudely dispelled at the eleventh hour. Poor Moses!
He had been so proud of having earned enough money to make a good
_Yontov_, and was more convinced than ever that given a little capital
to start with he could build up a colossal business! And now she would
have to go home and spoil everybody's _Yontov_, and see the sour faces
of her little ones round a barren _Seder_ table. Oh, it was terrible!
and the child wept piteously, unheeded in the block, unheard amid the
Babel.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DEAD MONKEY.

An old _Maaseh_ the grandmother had told her came back to h