oody orgies of the Crusaders had raged far away from the Capital of
the Cross. In England, in France, in Germany, the Jew, that scapegoat
of the nations, had poisoned the wells and brought on the Black Death,
had pierced the host, killed children for their blood, blasphemed the
saints, and done all that the imagination of defalcating debtors could
suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps
it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy
one of steady degradation rather than of fitful massacre. Nevertheless
bloodshed was not unknown, and the song died on Rachel's lips, though
the sterner Manasseh still chanted on.

"The Grecians were gathered against me in the days of the Hasmoneans;
they broke down the walls of my towers and defiled all the oils; but
from one of the last remaining flasks a miracle was wrought for Thy
lily, Israel; and the men of understanding appointed these eight days
for songs and praises."

They were well-to-do people, and Rachel's dress betokened the limit of
the luxury allowed by the Pragmatic--a second-hand silk dress with a
pin at the throat set with only a single pearl, a bracelet on one arm,
a ring without a bezel on one finger, a single-stringed necklace round
her neck, her hair done in a cheap net.

She looked at the nine-branched candlestick, and a mystical sadness
filled her. Would she had nine scions of her house like Miriam's
mother, a true mother in Israel; but, lo! she had only one candle--one
little candle. A puff and it was gone, and life would be dark.

That Joseph was not in the Ghetto was certain. He would never have
caused her such anxiety wilfully, and, indeed, she and her husband and
Miriam had already run to all the likely places in the quarter, even
to those marshy alleys where every overflow of the Tiber left deposits
of malarious mud, where families harbored, ten in a house, where
stunted men and wrinkled women slouched through the streets, and a
sickly spawn of half-naked babies swarmed under the feet. They had had
trouble enough, but never such a trouble as this. Manasseh and Rachel,
with this queer offspring of theirs, this Joseph the Dreamer, as he
had been nicknamed, this handsome, reckless black-eyed son of theirs,
with his fine oval face, his delicate olive features; this young man,
who could not settle down to the restricted forms of commerce possible
in the Ghetto, who was to be Rabbi of the community one day, albeit
h