that would be criminal extravagance.  No, one would suffice for the banquet, the other must be carefully put by.  “To-morrow is also a day,” as the old grandmother used to say in her quaint jargon.  But the banquet was not to be spread as fast as Esther’s fancy could fly; the doors must be shut again, other semi-divine and wholly divine persons (in white ties) must move and second (with eloquence and length) votes of thanks to the President, the Rabbinate, and all other available recipients; a French visitor must express his admiration of English charity.  But at last the turn of the gnawing stomachs came.  The motley crowd, still babbling, made a slow, forward movement, squeezing painfully through the narrow aperture, and shivering a plate glass window pane at the side of the cattle-pen in the crush; the semi-divine persons rubbed their hands and smiled genially; ingenious paupers tried to dodge round to the cauldrons by the semi-divine entrance; the tropical humming-birds fluttered among the crows; there was a splashing of ladles and a gurgling of cascades of soup into the cans, and a hubbub of voices; a toothless, white-haired, blear-eyed hag lamented in excellent English that soup was refused her, owing to her case not having yet been investigated, and her tears moistened the one loaf she received.  In like hard case a Russian threw himself on the stones and howled.  But at last Esther was running through the mist, warmed by the pitcher which she hugged to her bosom, and suppressing the blind impulse to pinch the pair of loaves tied up in her pinafore.  She almost flew up the dark flight of stairs to the attic in Royal Street.  Little Sarah was sobbing querulously.  Esther, conscious of being an angel of deliverance, tried to take the last two steps at once, tripped and tumbled ignominiously against the garret-door, which flew back and let her fall into the room with a crash.  The pitcher shivered into fragments under her aching little bosom, the odorous soup spread itself in an irregular pool over the boards, and flowed under the two beds and dripped down the crevices into the room beneath.  Esther burst into tears; her frock was wet and greased, her hands were cut and bleeding.  Little Sarah checked her sobs at the disaster.  Moses Ansell was not yet returned from evening service, but the withered old grandmother, whose wizened face loomed through the gloom of the cold, unlit garret, sat up on the bed and cursed her angrily for a Schlemihl.  A sense of injustice made Esther cry more bitterly.  She had never broken anything for years past.  Ikey, an eerie-looking dot of four and a half years, tottered towards her (all the Ansells had learnt to see in the dark), and nestling his curly head against her wet bodice, murmured: 

“Neva mind, Estie, I lat oo teep in my new bed.”