rves
as the children's play-ground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its
slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings.
Both fall in well with the home-lives and environment of the unhappy
little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. They get there the first
instruction they receive in the only tongues with which the teachers are
familiar, Hebrew and the Jargon, in the only studies which they are
competent to teach, the Talmud and the Prophets. Until they are six years
old they are under the "Melammed's" rod all day; after that only in the
interval between public school and supper. It is practically the only
religious instruction the poorest Jewish children receive, but it is
claimed by some of their rabbis that they had better have none at all. The
daily transition, they say, from the bright and, by comparison,
aesthetically beautiful public school-room to these dark and inhospitable
dens, with which the faith that has brought so many miseries upon their
race comes to be inseparably associated in the child's mind as he grows
up, tends to reflections that breed indifference, if not infidelity, in
the young. It would not be strange if this were so. If the schools,
through this process, also help pave the way for the acceptance of the
Messiah heretofore rejected, which I greatly doubt, it may be said to be
the only instance in which the East Side tenement has done its tenants a
good Christian turn.

There is no more remarkable class in any school than that of these
Melammedim,[5] that may be seen in session any week day forenoon, save on
Saturday, of course, in the Hebrew Institute in East Broadway. Old bearded
men struggling through the intricacies of the first reader, "a cow, a
cat," and all the rest of childish learning, with a rapt attention and a
concentration of energy as if they were devoting themselves to the most
heroic of tasks, which, indeed, they are, for the good that may come of it
cannot easily be overestimated. As an educational measure it may be said
to be getting down to first principles with a vengeance. When the reader
has been mastered, brief courses in the history of the United States, the
Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution follow. The test of
proficiency in the pupil is his ability to translate the books of the Old
Testament, with which he is familiar, of course, from Hebrew into English,
and _vice versa_. The Melammed is rarely a dull scholar. No one knows
bet