end shook the child’s soul to its depths.  Poor lad!  How horrible to be lying cold and ghastly beneath the winter snow!  What had been the use of all his long prepay rations to write great novels?  The name of Ansell would now become ingloriously extinct.  She wondered whether Our Own would collapse and secretly felt it must.  And then what of the hopes of worldly wealth she had built on Benjamin’s genius?  Alas! the emancipation of the Ansells from the yoke of poverty was clearly postponed.  To her and her alone must the family now look for deliverance.  Well, she would take up the mantle of the dead boy, and fill it as best she might.  She clenched her little hands in iron determination.  Moses Ansell knew nothing either of her doubts or her ambitions.  Work was still plentiful three days a week, and he was unconscious he was not supporting his family in comparative affluence.  But even with Esther the incessant grind of school-life and quasi-motherhood speedily rubbed away the sharper edges of sorrow, though the custom prohibiting obvious pleasures during the year of mourning went in no danger of transgression, for poor little Esther gadded neither to children’s balls nor to theatres.  Her thoughts were full of the prospects of piscine bargains, as she pushed her way through a crowd so closely wedged, and lit up by such a flare of gas from the shops and such streamers of flame from the barrows that the cold wind of early April lost its sting.

Two opposing currents of heavy-laden pedestrians were endeavoring in their progress to occupy the same strip of pavement at the same moment, and the laws of space kept them blocked till they yielded to its remorseless conditions.  Rich and poor elbowed one another, ladies in satins and furs were jammed against wretched looking foreign women with their heads swathed in dirty handkerchiefs; rough, red-faced English betting men struggled good-humoredly with their greasy kindred from over the North Sea; and a sprinkling of Christian yokels surveyed the Jewish hucksters and chapmen with amused superiority.

For this was the night of nights, when the purchases were made for the festival, and great ladies of the West, leaving behind their daughters who played the piano and had a subscription at Mudie’s, came down again to the beloved Lane to throw off the veneer of refinement, and plunge gloveless hands in barrels where pickled cucumbers weltered in their own “russell,” and to pick fat juicy olives from the rich-heaped tubs.  Ah, me! what tragic comedy lay behind the transient happiness of these sensuous faces, laughing and munching with the shamelessness of school-girls!  For to-night they need not hanker in silence after the flesh-pots of Egypt.  To-night they could laugh and talk over Olov hasholom times—­“Peace be upon him” times—­with their old cronies, and loosen the stays of social ambition, even while they dazzled the Ghetto with the splendors of their get-up and the halo of the West End whence they came.  It was a scene without parallel in the history of the world—­this phantasmagoria of grubs and butterflies, met together for auld lang syne in their beloved hatching-place.  Such violent contrasts of wealth and poverty as might be looked for in romantic gold-fields, or in unsettled countries were evolved quite naturally amid a colorless civilization by a people with an incurable talent for the picturesque.