Mordecai
Schwartz, whose address Baruch Emanuel had so obligingly given him. He
thought of the _Maggid's_ sermon on the day before. The _Maggid_ had
explained a verse of Habakkuk in quite an original way which gave an
entirely new color to a passage in Deuteronomy. Moses experienced acute
pleasure in musing upon it, and went past Mordecai's shop without going
in, and was only awakened from his day-dream by the brazen clanging of a
bell It was the bell of the great Ghetto school, summoning its pupils
from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars,
calling them to come and be Anglicized. And they came in a great
straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way, big children
and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in
washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great
shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy
children, and diseased children; bright-eyed children and hollow-eyed
children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-colored
English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads,
with pear-shaped heads; with old men's faces, with cherubs' faces, with
monkeys' faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed
children; children conning their lessons and children romping
carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the
blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent,
the exemplary, the dull--spawn of all countries--all hastening at the
inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great,
blind, inexorable Governmental machine. Here, too, was a miniature fair,
the path being lined by itinerant temptations. There was brisk traffic
in toffy, and gray peas and monkey-nuts, and the crowd was swollen by
anxious parents seeing tiny or truant offspring safe within the
school-gates. The women were bare-headed or be-shawled, with infants at
their breasts and little ones toddling at their sides, the men were
greasy, and musty, and squalid. Here a bright earnest little girl held
her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him
in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in
petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful
durance. It was a drab picture--the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy,
miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children.

"Monkey-nuts! Monkey-nuts!"