d;
The last burlesque is playing in the Strand--
In modern prose, all poetry seems drowned.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night
An ancient people celebrates its birth
To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,
With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,
Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright,
Its God shall be the God of all the Earth."

To an imaginative child like Esther, _Seder_ night was a charmed time.
The strange symbolic dishes--the bitter herbs and the sweet mixture of
apples, almonds, spices and wine, the roasted bone and the lamb, the
salt water and the four cups of raisin wine, the great round unleavened
cakes, with their mottled surfaces, some specially thick and sacred, the
special Hebrew melodies and verses with their jingle of rhymes and
assonances, the quaint ceremonial with its striking moments, as when the
finger was dipped in the wine and the drops sprinkled over the shoulder
in repudiation of the ten plagues of Egypt cabalistically magnified to
two hundred and fifty; all this penetrated deep into her consciousness
and made the recurrence of every Passover coincide with a rush of
pleasant anticipations and a sense of the special privilege of being
born a happy Jewish child. Vaguely, indeed, did she co-ordinate the
celebration with the history enshrined in it or with the prospective
history of her race. It was like a tale out of the fairy-books, this
miraculous deliverance of her forefathers in the dim haze of antiquity;
true enough but not more definitely realized on that account. And yet
not easily dissoluble links were being forged with her race, which has
anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by making it religion.

The _Matzoth_ that Esther ate were not dainty--they were coarse, of the
quality called "seconds," for even the unleavened bread of charity is
not necessarily delicate eating--but few things melted sweeter on the
palate than a segment of a _Matso_ dipped in cheap raisin wine: the
unconventionally of the food made life less common, more picturesque.
Simple Ghetto children into whose existence the ceaseless round of fast
and feast, of prohibited and enjoyed pleasures, of varying species of
food, brought change and relief! Imprisoned in the area of a few narrow
streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary
houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the
spirit of childhood took radiance and color