of Abraham congregate.

The traveller from the palatial West will perhaps shrink from leaving on
his right hand Aldgate Pump, and plunging in the dark alleys and crowded
lanes in which the Jews reside. Nor, if he be of a fastidious stomach,
would I much blame him. In Meeting House Yard, for instance, I saw a
pool of dark fluid, around which little pale children were playing,
suggesting something very rotten in the state of Denmark. It is in this
neighbourhood that the far-famed Rag Fair is held on the Sunday, and all
the week there is more or less dealing in such articles as come under the
denomination of "old clo'," respecting which it may as a general rule be
safely affirmed that, whilst we may dispute the title of clo', as regards
much there vended, there can be no dispute as to the appropriateness of
the descriptive adjective. In the lanes and courts around us are names
familiar to us from infancy. Lazarus keeps a second-hand book-shop, and
Moses sells fried fish. You see a printing-office, with posters up; on
those posters are Hebrew characters. In Duke Street there are a couple
of book-shops, but the books are all or chiefly Hebrew. In this
neighbourhood you can easily forget that you are in London at all. It is
not the English tongue you hear; or, if it be, it comes to you disguised
in such a foreign accent as to be scarcely intelligible. Through the
mist and fog dark eyes, all redolent of the far-off East, flash on you;
and now and then a tall figure in flowing robes, sad and solitary, stalks
by; and you rub your eyes to be sure that you are not in a dream. This
temporary delusion will be stronger if you visit this neighbourhood on a
Friday evening just after sunset. In Whitechapel and Aldgate the gas is
flaring, and a busy trade is carried on; in Leadenhall Street, in the
offices of the great Navigation Companies or of the leading shipbrokers,
clerks are busy writing, and weather-beaten skippers from Australia or
the Cape or New Zealand are tearing about, if we may use a colloquial
expression much in vogue, like mad. It is a contrast to pass from this
busy scene into the Jewish quarter, where the shops are all shut up and
where all is still. How is this? The answer is, it is the eve of the
Sabbath, and the Jews are at their synagogues. There are three in this
neighbourhood. The first and oldest is that of the Portuguese Jews in
King Street, Duke's Place, erected in 1656. The first German synagog