same money. There were two strata of Ghetto girls, those who strolled in
the Strand on Sabbath, and those who strolled in the Whitechapel Road.
Leah was of the upper stratum. She was a tall lovely brunette, exuberant
of voice and figure, with coarse red hands. She doted on ice-cream in
the summer, and hot chocolate in the winter, but her love of the theatre
was a perennial passion. Both Sam and she had good ears, and were always
first in the field with the latest comic opera tunes. Leah's healthy
vitality was prodigious. There was a legend in the Lane of such a maiden
having been chosen by a coronet; Leah was satisfied with Sam, who was
just her match. On the heels of Sam came several other guests, notably
Mrs. Jacobs (wife of "Reb" Shemuel), with her pretty daughter, Hannah.
Mr. Hyams, the _Cohen_, came last--the Priest whose functions had so
curiously dwindled since the times of the Temples. To be called first to
the reading of the Law, to bless his brethren with symbolic spreadings
of palms and fingers in a mystic incantation delivered, standing
shoeless before the Ark of the Covenant at festival seasons, to redeem
the mother's first-born son when neither parent was of priestly
lineage--these privileges combined with a disability to be with or near
the dead, differentiated his religious position from that of the Levite
or the Israelite. Mendel Hyams was not puffed up about his tribal
superiority, though if tradition were to be trusted, his direct descent
from Aaron, the High Priest, gave him a longer genealogy than Queen
Victoria's. He was a meek sexagenarian, with a threadbare black coat and
a child-like smile. All the pride of the family seemed to be monopolized
by his daughter Miriam, a girl whose very nose Heaven had fashioned
scornful. Miriam had accompanied him out of contemptuous curiosity. She
wore a stylish feather in her hat, and a boa round her throat, and
earned thirty shillings a week, all told, as a school teacher. (Esther
Ansell was in her class just now.) Probably her toilette had made old
Hyams unpunctual. His arrival was the signal for the commencement of the