Almost all the company speculated on the Hamburg lottery, which, whether they were speaking Yiddish or English, they invariably accentuated on the last syllable.  When an inhabitant of the Ghetto won even his money back, the news circulated like wild-fire, and there was a rush to the agents for tickets.  The chances of sudden wealth floated like dazzling Will o’ the Wisps on the horizon, illumining the gray perspectives of the future.  The lottery took the poor ticket-holders out of themselves, and gave them an interest in life apart from machine-cotton, lasts or tobacco-leaf.  The English laborer, who has been forbidden State Lotteries, relieves the monotony of existence by an extremely indirect interest in the achievements of a special breed of horses.

“Nu, Pesach, another glass of rum,” said Mr. Belcovitch genially to his future son-in-law and boarder.

“Yes, I will,” said Pesach.  “After all, this is the first time I’ve got engaged.”

The rum was of Mr. Belcovitch’s own manufacture; its ingredients were unknown, but the fame of it travelled on currents of air to the remotest parts of the house.  Even the inhabitants of the garrets sniffed and thought of turpentine.  Pesach swallowed the concoction, murmuring “To life” afresh.  His throat felt like the funnel of a steamer, and there were tears in his eyes when he put down the glass.

“Ah, that was good,” he murmured.

“Not like thy English drinks, eh?” said Mr. Belcovitch.

“England!” snorted Pesach in royal disdain.  “What a country!  Daddle-doo is a language and ginger-beer a liquor.”

“Daddle doo” was Pesach’s way of saying “That’ll do.”  It was one of the first English idioms he picked up, and its puerility made him facetious.  It seemed to smack of the nursery; when a nation expressed its soul thus, the existence of a beverage like ginger-beer could occasion no further surprise.

“You shan’t have anything stronger than ginger-beer when we’re married,” said Fanny laughingly.  “I am not going to have any drinking.’”

“But I’ll get drunk on ginger-beer,” Pesach laughed back.

“You can’t,” Fanny said, shaking her large fond smile to and fro.  “By my health, not.”

“Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Can’t even get shikkur on it.  What a liquor!”

In the first Anglo-Jewish circles with which Pesach had scraped acquaintance, ginger-beer was the prevalent drink; and, generalizing almost as hastily as if he were going to write a book on the country, he concluded that it was the national beverage.  He had long since discovered his mistake, but the drift of the discussion reminded Becky of a chance for an arrow.

“On the day when you sit for joy, Pesach,” she said slily.  “I shall send you a valentine.”

Pesach colored up and those in the secret laughed; the reference was to another of Pesach’s early ideas.  Some mischievous gossip had heard him arguing with another Greener outside a stationer’s shop blazing with comic valentines.  The two foreigners were extremely puzzled to understand what these monstrosities portended; Pesach, however, laid it down that the microcephalous gentlemen with tremendous legs, and the ladies five-sixths head and one-sixth skirt, were representations of the English peasants who lived in the little villages up country.