To an imaginative child like Esther, Seder night was a charmed time.  The strange symbolic dishes—­the bitter herbs and the sweet mixture of apples, almonds, spices and wine, the roasted bone and the lamb, the salt water and the four cups of raisin wine, the great round unleavened cakes, with their mottled surfaces, some specially thick and sacred, the special Hebrew melodies and verses with their jingle of rhymes and assonances, the quaint ceremonial with its striking moments, as when the finger was dipped in the wine and the drops sprinkled over the shoulder in repudiation of the ten plagues of Egypt cabalistically magnified to two hundred and fifty; all this penetrated deep into her consciousness and made the recurrence of every Passover coincide with a rush of pleasant anticipations and a sense of the special privilege of being born a happy Jewish child.  Vaguely, indeed, did she co-ordinate the celebration with the history enshrined in it or with the prospective history of her race.  It was like a tale out of the fairy-books, this miraculous deliverance of her forefathers in the dim haze of antiquity; true enough but not more definitely realized on that account.  And yet not easily dissoluble links were being forged with her race, which has anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by making it religion.

The Matzoth that Esther ate were not dainty—­they were coarse, of the quality called “seconds,” for even the unleavened bread of charity is not necessarily delicate eating—­but few things melted sweeter on the palate than a segment of a Matso dipped in cheap raisin wine:  the unconventionally of the food made life less common, more picturesque.  Simple Ghetto children into whose existence the ceaseless round of fast and feast, of prohibited and enjoyed pleasures, of varying species of food, brought change and relief!  Imprisoned in the area of a few narrow streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the spirit of childhood took radiance and color from its own inner light and the alchemy of youth could still transmute its lead to gold.  No little princess in the courts of fairyland could feel a fresher interest and pleasure in life than Esther sitting at the Seder table, where her father—­no longer a slave in Egypt—­leaned royally upon two chairs supplied with pillows as the Din prescribes.  Not even the monarch’s prime minister could have had a meaner opinion of Pharaoh than Moses Ansell in this symbolically sybaritic attitude.  A live dog is better than a dead lion, as a great teacher in Israel had said.  How much better then a live lion than a dead dog?  Pharaoh, for all his purple and fine linen and his treasure cities, was at the bottom of the Red Sea, smitten with two hundred and fifty plagues, and even if, as tradition asserted, he had been made to live on and on to be King of Nineveh, and to give ear to the warnings of