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 ever between the one and the other.  He had applied for help to the Jewish Board of Guardians, but red-tape rarely unwinds as quickly as hunger coils itself; moreover, Moses was an old offender in poverty at the Court of Charity.  But there was one species of alms which Moses could not be denied, and the existence of which Esther could not conceal from him as she concealed that of the eleemosynary breakfasts at the school.  For it was known to all men that soup and bread were to be had for the asking thrice a week at the Institution in Fashion Street, and in the Ansell household the opening of the soup-kitchen was looked forward to as the dawn of a golden age, when it would be impossible to pass more than one day without bread.  The vaguely-remembered smell of the soup threw a poetic fragrance over the coming winter.  Every year since Esther’s mother had died, the child had been sent to fetch home the provender, for Moses, who was the only other available member of the family, was always busy praying when he had nothing better to do.  And so to-night Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher, passing in her childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on the same errand, and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the institution.  An individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer the family pitcher.  To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away, and the regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket.  There was quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of the kitchen when Esther arrived, a few with well-lined stomachs, perhaps, but the majority famished and shivering.  The feminine element swamped the rest, but there were about a dozen men and a few children among the group, most of the men scarce taller than the children—­strange, stunted, swarthy, hairy creatures, with muddy complexions illumined by black, twinkling eyes.  A few were of imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around their throats.  Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets—­red shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls.  Yet there was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ugliness, and an underlying identity about the crowd of Polish, Russian, German, Dutch Jewesses, mutually apathetic, and pressing forwards.  Some of them had infants at their bare breasts, who drowsed quietly with intervals of ululation.  The women devoid of shawls had nothing around their necks to protect them from the cold, the dusky throats were exposed, and sometimes even the first hooks and eyes of the bodice were unnecessarily undone.  The majority wore cheap earrings and black wigs with preternaturally polished hair; where there was no wig, the hair was touzled.