ommerce and its mud.
Wentworth Street and Goulston Street were the chief branches, and in
festival times the latter was a pandemonium of caged poultry, clucking
and quacking and cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese and ducks were
bought alive, and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by the
official slaughterer. At Purim a gaiety, as of the Roman carnival,
enlivened the swampy Wentworth Street, and brought a smile into the
unwashed face of the pavement. The confectioners' shops, crammed with
"stuffed monkeys" and "bolas," were besieged by hilarious crowds of
handsome girls and their young men, fat women and their children, all
washing down the luscious spicy compounds with cups of chocolate;
temporarily erected swinging cradles bore a vociferous many-colored
burden to the skies; cardboard noses, grotesque in their departure from
truth, abounded. The Purim _Spiel_ or Purim play never took root in
England, nor was Haman ever burnt in the streets, but _Shalachmonos_, or
gifts of the season, passed between friend and friend, and masquerading
parties burst into neighbors' houses. But the Lane was lively enough on
the ordinary Friday and Sunday. The famous Sunday Fair was an event of
metropolitan importance, and thither came buyers of every sect. The
Friday Fair was more local, and confined mainly to edibles. The
Ante-Festival Fairs combined something of the other two, for Jews
desired to sport new hats and clothes for the holidays as well as to eat
extra luxuries, and took the opportunity of a well-marked epoch to
invest in new everythings from oil-cloth to cups and saucers. Especially
was this so at Passover, when for a week the poorest Jew must use a
supplementary set of crockery and kitchen utensils. A babel of sound,
audible for several streets around, denoted Market Day in Petticoat
Lane, and the pavements were blocked by serried crowds going both ways
at once.

It was only gradually that the community was Anglicized. Under the sway
of centrifugal impulses, the wealthier members began to form new
colonies, moulting their old feathers and replacing them by finer, and
flying ever further from the centre. Men of organizing ability founded
unrivalled philanthropic and educational institutions on British lines;
millionaires fought for political emancipation; brokers brazenly foisted
themselves on 'Change; ministers gave sermons in bad English; an English
journal was started; very slowly, the conventional Anglican tra