treet, and in the Ansell
household the opening of the soup-kitchen was looked forward to as the
dawn of a golden age, when it would be impossible to pass more than one
day without bread. The vaguely-remembered smell of the soup threw a
poetic fragrance over the coming winter. Every year since Esther's
mother had died, the child had been sent to fetch home the provender,
for Moses, who was the only other available member of the family, was
always busy praying when he had nothing better to do. And so to-night
Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher, passing in her
childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on the same errand,
and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the institution. An
individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer the family
pitcher. To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away, and the
regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket. There was
quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of the kitchen
when Esther arrived, a few with well-lined stomachs, perhaps, but the
majority famished and shivering. The feminine element swamped the rest,
but there were about a dozen men and a few children among the group,
most of the men scarce taller than the children--strange, stunted,
swarthy, hairy creatures, with muddy complexions illumined by black,
twinkling eyes. A few were of imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty
felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around
their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and
figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely
aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed,
their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets--red
shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there
was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and
witch-like ugliness, and an underlying identity about the crowd of
Polish, Russian, German, Dutch Jewesses, mutually apathetic, and
pressing forwards. Some of them had infants at their bare breasts, who
drowsed quietly with intervals of ululation. The women devoid of shawls
had nothing around their necks to protect them from the cold, the dusky
throats were exposed, and sometimes even the first hooks and eyes of the
bodice were unnecessarily undone. The majority wore cheap earrings and
black wigs with preternaturally polished hair; where there was no wig