of the synagogues in commemoration of the
days when the Children of Israel lived in tents in the wilderness.
The child's father, being particularly pious, had a booth all to
himself, thatched with green boughs, and hung with fruit, and
furnished with chairs and a table at which the child sat, with the
blue sky playing peep-bo through the leaves, and the white table-cloth
astir with quivering shadows and glinting sunbeams. And towards the
last days of the Festival he began to eat away the roof, consuming the
dangling apples and oranges, and the tempting grapes. And throughout
this beautiful Festival the synagogue rustled with palm branches, tied
with boughs of willows of the brook and branches of other pleasant
trees--as commanded in Leviticus--which the men waved and shook,
pointing them east and west and north and south, and then heavenwards,
and smelling also of citron kept in boxes lined with white wool. As
one could not breakfast before blessing the branches and the citron, a
man carried them round to such of the women-folk as household duties
kept at home--and indeed, home was a woman's first place, and to light
the Sabbath lamp a woman's holiest duty, and even at synagogue she sat
in a grated gallery away from the men downstairs. On the seventh day
of Tabernacles the child had a little bundle of leafy boughs styled
"Hosannas," which he whipped on the synagogue bench, his sins falling
away with the leaves that flew to the ground as he cried, "Hosanna,
save us now!" All through the night his father prayed in the
synagogue, but the child went home to bed, after a gallant struggle
with his closing eyelids, hoping not to see his headless shadow on the
stones, for that was a sign of death. But the ninth day of Tabernacles
was the best, "The Rejoicing of the Law," when the fifty-second
portion of the Pentateuch was finished and the first portion begun
immediately all over again, to show that the "rejoicing" was not
because the congregation was glad to be done with it. The man called
up to the last portion was termed "The Bridegroom of the Law," and to
the first portion "The Bridegroom of the Beginning," and they made a
wedding-feast to which everybody was invited. The boys scrambled for
sweets on the synagogue floor. The Scrolls of the Law were carried
round and round seven times, and the boys were in the procession with
flags and wax tapers in candlesticks of hollow carrots, joining
lustily in the poem with its alternati