ch with a silver
pointer and silver bells and pomegranates. The scrolls were in
manuscript, for the printing-press has never yet sullied the sanctity of
the synagogue editions of the Pentateuch. The room was badly ventilated
and what little air there was was generally sucked up by a greedy
company of wax candles, big and little, struck in brass holders. The
back window gave on the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and "moos"
mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came
hither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven and to
listen to sermons more exegetical than ethical. They dropped in, mostly
in their work-a-day garments and grime, and rumbled and roared and
chorused prayers with a zeal that shook the window-panes, and there was
never lack of _minyan_--the congregational quorum of ten. In the West
End, synagogues are built to eke out the income of poor _minyan-men_ or
professional congregants; in the East End rooms are tricked up for
prayer. This synagogue was all of luxury many of its Sons could boast.
It was their _salon_ and their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only
with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their
public amusements. It was their home as well as the Almighty's, and on
occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him. It was a
place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is;
for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence,
not ease. They enjoyed themselves in this _Shool_ of theirs; they
shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they
clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least
happy when they were crying. There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of
them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the "Confession"
caught him unexpectedly.

"We have trespassed," he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put
the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.

They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history,
exegetics, Talmudical controversies, _menus_, recipes, priestly
prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested
hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and
egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy,
as grotesque as it was beautiful--like an old cathedral in all styles of
architecture, stored with shabby antiquities