s Metropole" almost
opposite Baruch Emanuel's shop, and papered its outside walls with moral
pictorial posters, headed, "Where have you been to, Thomas Brown?" "Mike
and his moke," and so on. Here, single-bedded cabins could be had as low
as fourpence a night. From the journals in a tobacconist's window Esther
gathered that the reading-public had increased, for there were
importations from New York, both in jargon and in pure Hebrew, and from
a large poster in Yiddish and English, announcing a public meeting, she
learned of the existence of an off-shoot of the Holy Land League--"The
Flowers of Zion Society--established by East-End youths for the study of
Hebrew and the propagation of the Jewish National Idea." Side by side
with this, as if in ironic illustration of the other side of the life of
the Ghetto, was a seeming royal proclamation headed V.R., informing the
public that by order of the Secretary of State for War a sale of
wrought-and cast-iron, zinc, canvas, tools and leather would take place
at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich.

As she wandered on, the great school-bell began to ring; involuntarily,
she quickened her step and joined the chattering children's procession.
She could have fancied the last ten years a dream. Were they, indeed,
other children, or were they not the same that jostled her when she
picked her way through this very slush in her clumsy masculine boots?
Surely those little girls in lilac print frocks were her classmates! It
was hard to realize that Time's wheel had been whirling on, fashioning
her to a woman; that, while she had been living and learning and seeing
the manners of men and cities, the Ghetto, unaffected by her
experiences, had gone on in the same narrow rut. A new generation of
children had arisen to suffer and sport in room of the old, and that was
all. The thought overwhelmed her, gave her a new and poignant sense of
brute, blind forces; she seemed to catch in this familiar scene of
childhood the secret of the gray atmosphere of her spirit, it was here
she had, all insensibly, absorbed those heavy vapors that formed the
background of her being, a permanent sombre canvas behind all the
iridescent colors of joyous emotion. _What_ had she in common with all
this mean wretchedness? Why, everything. This it was with which her soul
had intangible affinities, not the glory of sun and sea and forest, "the
palms and temples of the South."

The heavy vibrations of the bell ceased; the stre