Moses understood that attitude towards the nature of things.  He went out and wandered down another narrow dirty street in search of Mordecai Schwartz, whose address Baruch Emanuel had so obligingly given him.  He thought of the Maggid’s sermon on the day before.  The Maggid had explained a verse of Habakkuk in quite an original way which gave an entirely new color to a passage in Deuteronomy.  Moses experienced acute pleasure in musing upon it, and went past Mordecai’s shop without going in, and was only awakened from his day-dream by the brazen clanging of a bell It was the bell of the great Ghetto school, summoning its pupils from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars, calling them to come and be Anglicized.  And they came in a great straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way, big children and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy children, and diseased children; bright-eyed children and hollow-eyed children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-colored English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads, with pear-shaped heads; with old men’s faces, with cherubs’ faces, with monkeys’ faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed children; children conning their lessons and children romping carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent, the exemplary, the dull—­spawn of all countries—­all hastening at the inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great, blind, inexorable Governmental machine.  Here, too, was a miniature fair, the path being lined by itinerant temptations.  There was brisk traffic in toffy, and gray peas and monkey-nuts, and the crowd was swollen by anxious parents seeing tiny or truant offspring safe within the school-gates.  The women were bare-headed or be-shawled, with infants at their breasts and little ones toddling at their sides, the men were greasy, and musty, and squalid.  Here a bright earnest little girl held her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates.  There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance.  It was a drab picture—­the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children.

“Monkey-nuts!  Monkey-nuts!” croaked a wizened old woman.

“Oppea!  Oppea!” droned a doddering old Dutchman.  He bore a great can of hot peas in one hand and a lighthouse-looking pepper-pot in the other.  Some of the children swallowed the dainties hastily out of miniature basins, others carried them within in paper packets for surreptitious munching.

“Call that a ay-puth?” a small boy would say.