from a caning on the morrow. She held her pen clumsily, for several of
her fingers were swathed in bloody rags tied with cobweb. The
grandmother dozed in her chair. Everything was quiet and peaceful,
though the atmosphere was chilly. Moses ate his supper with a great
smacking of the lips and an equivalent enjoyment. When it was over he
sighed deeply, and thanked God in a prayer lasting ten minutes, and
delivered in a rapid, sing-song manner. He then inquired of Solomon
whether he had said his evening prayer. Solomon looked out of the corner
of his eyes at his _Bube_, and, seeing she was asleep on the bed, said
he had, and kicked Esther significantly but hurtfully under the table.

"Then you had better say your night-prayer."

There was no getting out of that; so Solomon finished his sum, writing
the figures of the answer rather faint, in case he should discover from
another boy next morning that they were wrong; then producing a Hebrew
prayer-book from his inky cotton satchel, he made a mumbling sound, with
occasional enthusiastic bursts of audible coherence, for a length of
time proportioned to the number of pages. Then he went to bed. After
that, Esther put her grandmother to bed and curled herself up at her
side. She lay awake a long time, listening to the quaint sounds emitted
by her father in his study of Rashi's commentary on the Book of Job, the
measured drone blending not disagreeably with the far-away sounds of
Pesach Weingott's fiddle.

Pesach's fiddle played the accompaniment to many other people's
thoughts. The respectable master-tailor sat behind his glazed
shirt-front beating time with his foot. His little sickly-looking wife
stood by his side, nodding her bewigged head joyously. To both the music
brought the same recollection--a Polish market-place.