here a rising and there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast, this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible contingency.  Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box—­the thrill of the ram’s horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the jubilance of a festival “Amen” and the sobriety of a work-a-day “Amen,” the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, the minor keys of Atonement and the hilarious rhapsodies of Rejoicing, the plain chant of the Law and the more ornate intonation of the Prophets—­all this was known and loved and was far more important than the meaning of it all or its relation to their real lives; for page upon page was gabbled off at rates that could not be excelled by automata.  But if they did not always know what they were saying they always meant it.  If the service had been more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying.  There was not a sentiment, however incomprehensible, for which they were not ready to die or to damn.

“All Israel are brethren,” and indeed there was a strange antique clannishness about these “Sons of the Covenant” which in the modern world, where the ends of the ages meet, is Socialism.  They prayed for one another while alive, visited one another’s bedsides when sick, buried one another when dead.  No mercenary hands poured the yolks of eggs over their dead faces and arrayed their corpses in their praying-shawls.  No hired masses were said for the sick or the troubled, for the psalm-singing services of the “Sons of the Covenant” were always available for petitioning the Heavens, even though their brother had been arrested for buying stolen goods, and the service might be an invitation to Providence to compound a felony.  Little charities of their own they had, too—­a Sabbath Meal Society, and a Marriage Portion Society to buy the sticks for poor couples—­and when a pauper countryman arrived from Poland, one of them boarded him and another lodged him and a third taught him a trade.  Strange exotics in a land of prose carrying with them through the paven highways of London the odor of Continental Ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient, where God was born!  Hawkers and peddlers, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers and cap-makers—­this was in sum their life.  To pray much and to work long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to “drink” scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives (disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before the “Life of Man” and Joseph Cam’s “Prepared Table” as though the authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear phylacteries and fringes, to keep the beard unshaven, and the corners