When Becky returned with the medicine, Mrs. Belcovitch mentioned that it was extremely nasty, and offered the young man a taste, whereat he rejoiced inwardly, knowing he had found favor in the sight of the parent.  Mrs. Belcovitch paid a penny a week to her doctor, in sickness or health, so that there was a loss on being well.  Becky used to fill up the bottles with water to save herself the trouble of going to fetch the medicine, but as Mrs. Belcovitch did not know this it made no difference.

“Thou livest too much indoors,” said Mr. Sugarman, in Yiddish.

“Shall I march about in this weather?  Black and slippery, and the Angel going a-hunting?”

“Ah!” said Mr. Sugarman, relapsing proudly into the vernacular, “Ve English valk about in all vedders.”

Meanwhile Moses Ansell had returned from evening service and sat down, unquestioningly, by the light of an unexpected candle to his expected supper of bread and soup, blessing God for both gifts.  The rest of the family had supped.  Esther had put the two youngest children to bed (Rachel had arrived at years of independent undressing), and she and Solomon were doing home-lessons in copy-books, the candle saving them from a caning on the morrow.  She held her pen clumsily, for several of her fingers were swathed in bloody rags tied with cobweb.  The grandmother dozed in her chair.  Everything was quiet and peaceful, though the atmosphere was chilly.  Moses ate his supper with a great smacking of the lips and an equivalent enjoyment.  When it was over he sighed deeply, and thanked God in a prayer lasting ten minutes, and delivered in a rapid, sing-song manner.  He then inquired of Solomon whether he had said his evening prayer.  Solomon looked out of the corner of his eyes at his Bube, and, seeing she was asleep on the bed, said he had, and kicked Esther significantly but hurtfully under the table.

“Then you had better say your night-prayer.”

There was no getting out of that; so Solomon finished his sum, writing the figures of the answer rather faint, in case he should discover from another boy next morning that they were wrong; then producing a Hebrew prayer-book from his inky cotton satchel, he made a mumbling sound, with occasional enthusiastic bursts of audible coherence, for a length of time proportioned to the number of pages.  Then he went to bed.  After that, Esther put her grandmother to bed and curled herself up at her side.  She lay awake a long time, listening to the quaint sounds emitted by her father in his study of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Job, the measured drone blending not disagreeably with the far-away sounds of Pesach Weingott’s fiddle.

Pesach’s fiddle played the accompaniment to many other people’s thoughts.  The respectable master-tailor sat behind his glazed shirt-front beating time with his foot.  His little sickly-looking wife stood by his side, nodding her bewigged head joyously.  To both the music brought the same recollection—­a Polish market-place.