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