clan, Moses became a personage of prime
importance, and was summoned at all hours of the day and night to
wrestle with the angel Azrael. When the angel had retired, worsted,
after a match sometimes protracted into days, Moses relapsed into his
primitive insignificance, and was dismissed with a mouthful of rum and a
shilling. It never seemed to him an unfair equivalent, for nobody could
make less demand on the universe than Moses. Give him two solid meals
and three solid services a day, and he was satisfied, and he craved more
for spiritual snacks between meals than for physical.

The last crisis had been brief, and there was so little danger that,
when Milly's child was circumcised, Moses had not even been bidden to
the feast, though his piety would have made him the ideal _sandek_ or
god-father. He did not resent this, knowing himself dust--and that
anything but gold-dust.

Moses had hardly emerged from the little arched passage which led to the
Square, when sounds of strife fell upon his ears. Two stout women
chatting amicably at their doors, had suddenly developed a dispute. In
Zachariah Square, when you wanted to get to the bottom of a quarrel, the
cue was not "find the woman," but find the child. The high-spirited
bantlings had a way of pummelling one another in fistic duels, and of
calling in their respective mothers when they got the worse of it--which
is cowardly, but human. The mother of the beaten belligerent would then
threaten to wring the "year," or to twist the nose of the victorious
party--sometimes she did it. In either case, the other mother would
intervene, and then the two bantlings would retire into the background
and leave their mothers to take up the duel while they resumed their
interrupted game.

Of such sort was the squabble betwixt Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs. Mrs.
Isaacs pointed out with superfluous vehemence that her poor lamb had
been mangled beyond recognition. Mrs. Jacobs, _per contra_, asseverated
with superfluous gesture that it was _her_ poor lamb who had received
irreparable injury. These statements were not in mutual contradiction,
but Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs were, and so the point at issue was
gradually absorbed in more personal recriminations.

"By my life, and by my Fanny's life, I'll leave my seal on the first
child of yours that comes across my way! There!" Thus Mrs. Isaacs.

"Lay a linger on a hair of a child of mine, and, by my husband's life,
I'll summons you; I'll ha