the church--by which name he put the synagogue to the Gentile
comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops on either
hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat plucking geese;
while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese hung from the
rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet of geese, and
certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each a goose dragging
at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner peculiar to dead
poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of geese, and the smell of
roasting geese came out of the windows of the grim and lofty houses.

Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive cicerone
I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy,
and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency, the aimless
fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys of the
synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which he shouted
to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and never gained
the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities that we
presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a dark-faced
Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish synagogue.

Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by the
Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy Office.
Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of worship, and we
reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark and narrow
stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way were set tablets
to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had bequeathed their
substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the sacristan informed us
that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by rich descendants of
Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to furnish indigent
Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and who claim the benefit