“Avroomkely (dear little Abraham) take lebbenpence!”

“Elevenpence!  By G——­,” cried Uncle Abe, desperately tearing his hair.  “I knew it!” And seizing a huge plaice by the tail he whirled it round and struck Mrs. Shmendrik full in the face, shouting, “Take that, you old witch!  Sling your hook or I’ll murder you.”

“Thou dog!” shrieked Mrs. Shmendrik, falling back on the more copious resources of her native idiom.  “A black year on thee!  Mayest thou swell and die!  May the hand that struck me rot away!  Mayest thou be burned alive!  Thy father was a Gonof and thou art a Gonof and thy whole family are Gonovim.  May Pharaoh’s ten plagues—­”

There was little malice at the back of it all—­the mere imaginative exuberance of a race whose early poetry consisted in saying things twice over.

Uncle Abraham menacingly caught up the plaice, crying: 

“May I be struck dead on the spot, if you ain’t gone in one second I won’t answer for the consequences.  Now, then, clear off!”

“Come, Avroomkely,” said Mrs. Shmendrik, dropping suddenly from invective to insinuativeness.  “Take fourteenpence. Shemah, beni!  Fourteen Shtibbur’s a lot of Gelt."

“Are you a-going?” cried Abraham in a terrible rage.  “Ten bob’s my price now.”

“Avroomkely, noo, zoog (say now)!  Fourteenpence ’apenny.  I am a poor voman.  Here, fifteenpence.”

Abraham seized her by the shoulders and pushed her towards the wall, where she cursed picturesquely.  Esther thought it was a bad time to attempt to get her own shilling’s worth—­she fought her way towards another fishmonger.

There was a kindly, weather-beaten old fellow with whom Esther had often chaffered job-lots when fortune smiled on the Ansells.  Him, to her joy, Esther perceived—­she saw a stack of gurnards on his improvised slab, and in imagination smelt herself frying them.  Then a great shock as of a sudden icy douche traversed her frame, her heart seemed to stand still.  For when she put her hand to her pocket to get her purse, she found but a thimble and a slate-pencil and a cotton handkerchief.  It was some minutes before she could or would realize the truth that the four and sevenpence halfpenny on which so much depended was gone.  Groceries and unleavened cakes Charity had given, raisin wine had been preparing for days, but fish and meat and all the minor accessories of a well-ordered Passover table—­these were the prey of the pickpocket.  A blank sense of desolation overcame the child, infinitely more horrible than that which she felt when she spilled the soup; the gurnards she could have touched with her finger seemed far off, inaccessible; in a moment more they and all things were blotted out by a hot rush of tears, and she was jostled as in a dream hither and thither by the double stream of crowd.  Nothing since the death of Benjamin had given her so poignant