a beautiful brown, the substance firm and succulent.  The very bones thereof are full of marrow, yea and charged with memories of the happy past.  Fried fish binds Anglo-Judaea more than all the lip-professions of unity.  Its savor is early known of youth, and the divine flavor, endeared by a thousand childish recollections, entwined with the most sacred associations, draws back the hoary sinner into the paths of piety.  It is on fried fish, mayhap, that the Jewish matron grows fat.  In the days of the Messiah, when the saints shall feed off the Leviathan; and the Sea Serpent shall be dished up for the last time, and the world and the silly season shall come to an end, in those days it is probable that the saints will prefer their Leviathan fried.  Not that any physical frying will be necessary, for in those happy times (for whose coming every faithful Israelite prays three times a day), the Leviathan will have what taste the eater will.  Possibly a few highly respectable saints, who were fashionable in their day and contrived to live in Kensington without infection of paganism, will take their Leviathan in conventional courses, and beginning with hors d’oeuvres may will him everything by turns and nothing long; making him soup and sweets, joint and entree, and even ices and coffee, for in the millennium the harassing prohibition which bars cream after meat will fall through.  But, however this be, it is beyond question that the bulk of the faithful will mentally fry him, and though the Christian saints, who shall be privileged to wait at table, hand them plate after plate, fried fish shall be all the fare.  One suspects that Hebrews gained the taste in the Desert of Sinai, for the manna that fell there was not monotonous to the palate as the sciolist supposes, but likewise mutable under volition.  It were incredible that Moses, who gave so many imperishable things to his people, did not also give them the knowledge of fried fish, so that they might obey his behest, and rejoice, before the Lord.  Nay, was it not because, while the manna fell, there could be no lack of fish to fry, that they lingered forty years in a dreary wilderness?  Other delicious things there are in Jewish cookery—­Lockschen, which are the apotheosis of vermicelli, Ferfel, which are Lockschen in an atomic state, and Creplich, which are triangular meat-pasties, and Kuggol, to which pudding has a far-away resemblance; and there is even gefuellte Fisch, which is stuffed fish without bones—­but fried fish reigns above all in cold, unquestioned sovereignty.  No other people possesses the recipe.  As a poet of the commencement of the century sings: 

    The Christians are ninnies, they can’t fry Dutch plaice,
    Believe me, they can’t tell a carp from a dace.

It was while discussing a deliciously brown oblong of the Dutch plaice of the ballad that Samuel Levine appeared to be struck by an idea.  He threw down his knife and fork and exclaimed in Hebrew. “Shemah beni!”