c glance.
Around went on the Town's satanic dance,
Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled.
_Shalom Aleichem_ mournfully each said,
Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance.

Sudden from Church out rolled an organ hymn,
From Synagogue a loudly chaunted air,
Each with its Prophet's high acclaim instinct.
Then for the first time met their eyes, swift-linked
In one strange, silent, piteous gaze, and dim
With bitter tears of agonized despair.

A CHILD OF THE GHETTO

I

The first thing the child remembered was looking down from a window
and seeing, ever so far below, green water flowing, and on it gondolas
plying, and fishing-boats with colored sails, the men in them looking
as small as children. For he was born in the Ghetto of Venice, on the
seventh story of an ancient house. There were two more stories, up
which he never went, and which remained strange regions, leading
towards the blue sky. A dusky staircase, with gaunt whitewashed walls,
led down and down--past doors whose lintels all bore little tin cases
containing holy Hebrew words--into the narrow court of the oldest
Ghetto in the world. A few yards to the right was a portico leading to
the bank of a canal, but a grim iron gate barred the way. The water of
another canal came right up to the back of the Ghetto, and cut off all
egress that way; and the other porticoes leading to the outer world
were likewise provided with gates, guarded by Venetian watchmen. These
gates were closed at midnight and opened in the morning, unless it was
the Sabbath or a Christian holiday, when they remained shut all day,
so that no Jew could go in or out of the court, the street, the big
and little square, and the one or two tiny alleys that made up the
Ghetto. There were no roads in the Ghetto, any more than in the rest
of Venice; nothing but pavements ever echoing the tramp of feet. At
night the watchmen rowed round and round its canals in large barcas,
which the Jews had to pay for. But the child did not feel a prisoner.
As he had no wish to go outside the gates, he did not feel the chain
that would have drawn him back again, like a dog to a kennel; and
although all the men and women he knew wore yellow hats and large O's
on their breasts when they went into the world beyond, yet for a long
time the child scarcely realized that there were people in the world
who were not Jews, still less that these hats and these rounds of
y