Children of the Ghetto | Page 6

the stage of adorning sweeps on May Day, and Dutch
Sam's fist is bonier than ever. The same mould covers them all--those
who donated guineas and those who donated "gifts," the rogues and the
hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls, the observant and the lax, the
purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and the genteel, the wonderful
chapmen and the luckless Schlemihls, Rabbi and Dayan and Shochet,
the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and the cantors who trolled it
off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men who never listened to it;
the grimy Russians of the capotes and the earlocks, and the
blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who ruffled it
with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society. Those
who kneaded the toothsome "bolas" lie with those who ate them; and
the marriage-brokers repose with those they mated. The olives and the
cucumbers grow green and fat as of yore, but their lovers are mixed

with a soil that is barren of them. The restless, bustling crowds that
jostled laughingly in Rag Fair are at rest in the "House of Life;" the
pageant of their strenuous generation is vanished as a dream. They died
with the declaration of God's unity on their stiffening lips, and the
certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew
inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their
only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust.
Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind
eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past,
hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek
wet with the pathos sanctifying the joys that have been.

BOOK I.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.
CHAPTER I.
THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION.
A dead and gone wag called the street "Fashion Street," and most of the
people who live in it do not even see the joke. If it could exchange
names with "Rotten Row," both places would be more appropriately
designated. It is a dull, squalid, narrow thoroughfare in the East End of
London, connecting Spitalfields with Whitechapel, and branching off in
blind alleys. In the days when little Esther Ansell trudged its unclean
pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the blasphemies from
some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in the capital of the
civilized world. Some of these clotted spiders'-webs have since been
swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the spiders have
scurried off into darker crannies.
There were the conventional touches about the London street-picture,
as Esther Ansell sped through the freezing mist of the December
evening, with a pitcher in her hand, looking in her oriental coloring like
a miniature of Rebecca going to the well. A female street-singer, with a

trail of infants of dubious maternity, troubled the air with a piercing
melody; a pair of slatterns with arms a-kimbo reviled each other's
relatives; a drunkard lurched along, babbling amiably; an organ-grinder,
blue-nosed as his monkey, set some ragged children jigging under the
watery rays of a street-lamp. Esther drew her little plaid shawl tightly
around her, and ran on without heeding these familiar details, her
chilled feet absorbing the damp of the murky pavement through the
worn soles of her cumbrous boots. They were masculine boots, kicked
off by some intoxicated tramp and picked up by Esther's father. Moses
Ansell had a habit of lighting on windfalls, due, perhaps, to his meek
manner of walking with bent head, as though literally bowed beneath
the yoke of the Captivity. Providence rewarded him for his humility by
occasional treasure-trove. Esther had received a pair of new boots from
her school a week before, and the substitution, of the tramp's foot-gear
for her own resulted in a net profit of half-a-crown, and kept Esther's
little brothers and sisters in bread for a week. At school, under her
teacher's eye, Esther was very unobtrusive about the feet for the next
fortnight, but as the fear of being found out died away, even her rather
morbid conscience condoned the deception in view of the stomachic
gain.
They gave away bread and milk at the school, too, but Esther and her
brothers and sisters never took either, for fear of being thought in want
of them. The superiority of a class-mate is hard to bear, and a
high-spirited child will not easily acknowledge starvation in presence
of a roomful of purse-proud urchins, some of them able to spend a
farthing a day on pure luxuries. Moses Ansell would have been grieved
had he known his children were refusing the bread he could not give
them. Trade was slack in the sweating dens, and Moses, who had
always lived from hand to mouth, had latterly held less than