“My justification,” replied the Rabbi, “is in the Talmud, where it says, ‘Danger drives away the Sabbath.’”

“Danger!” screamed the tall Nose Star, in mortal terror.  “Danger! danger!  Drummer Jack!—­drum, drum.  Danger! danger!  Drummer Jack!” From without resounded the deep, beery voice of Drummer Jack, “Death and destruction!  The devil take the Jews.  That’s the third time today that you’ve roused me out of a sound sleep, Nose Star!  Don’t make me mad!  For when I am mad I’m the very devil himself; and then as sure as I’m a Christian, I’ll up with my gun and shoot through the grated window in your gate—­and then fellow, let everybody look out for his nose!”

“Don’t shoot! don’t shoot!  I’m a lonely man,” wailed Nose Star piteously, pressing his face against the wall, and trembling and murmuring prayers in this position.

“But say, what has happened?” cried Jaekel the Fool, with all the impatient curiosity which was even then characteristic of the Frankfort Jews.

But the Rabbi impatiently broke loose from them, and went his way along the Jews’ Street.  “See, Sara!” he exclaimed, “how badly guarded is our Israel.  False friends guard its gates without, and within its watchers are Folly and Fear.”

They wandered slowly through the long empty street, where only here and there the head of some young girl showed itself in a window, against the polished panes of which the sun was brilliantly reflected.  At that time the houses in the Jewish quarter were still neat and new, and much lower than they now are, since it was only later on that the Jews, as their number greatly increased, while they could not enlarge their quarter, built one story over another, squeezed themselves together like sardines, and were thus stunted both in body and soul.  That part of the Jewish quarter which remained standing after the great fire, and which is called the Old Lane, those high blackened houses, where a grinning, sweaty race of people bargains and chaffers, is a horrible relic of the Middle Ages.  The older synagogue exists no more; it was less capacious than the present one, which was built later, after the Nuremberg exiles were taken into the community, and lay more to the north.

The Rabbi had no need to ask where it was.  He recognized it from afar by the buzz of many loud voices.  In the court of the House of God he parted from his wife, and after washing his hands at the fountain there, he entered the lower part of the synagogue where the men pray, while Sara ascended a flight of stairs and entered the place reserved for women.  The latter was a kind of gallery with three rows of seats painted a reddish brown, whose backs were fitted with a hanging board, which held the prayer-books, and which could be raised and lowered.  Here the women either sat gossiping or stood up in deep prayer.  They often went and peered with curiosity through the large grating on the eastern side, through the thin, green