grinning inhabitants.  Most of the doors were ajar, wintry as the air was:  for the Zachariah Squareites lived a good deal on the door-step.  In the summer, the housewives sat outside on chairs and gossiped and knitted, as if the sea foamed at their feel, and wrinkled good-humored old men played nap on tea-trays.  Some of the doors were blocked below with sliding barriers of wood, a sure token of infants inside given to straying.  More obvious tokens of child-life were the swings nailed to the lintels of a few doors, in which, despite the cold, toothless babes swayed like monkeys on a branch.  But the Square, with its broad area of quadrangular pavement, was an ideal playing-ground for children, since other animals came not within its precincts, except an inquisitive dog or a local cat.  Solomon Ansell knew no greater privilege than to accompany his father to these fashionable quarters and whip his humming-top across the ample spaces, the while Moses transacted his business with Malka.  Last time the business was psalm-saying.  Milly had been brought to bed of a son, but it was doubtful if she would survive, despite the charms hung upon the bedpost to counteract the nefarious designs of Lilith, the wicked first wife of Adam, and of the Not-Good Ones who hover about women in childbirth.  So Moses was sent for, post-haste, to intercede with the Almighty.  His piety, it was felt, would command attention.  For an average of three hundred and sixty-two days a year Moses was a miserable worm, a nonentity, but on the other three, when death threatened to visit Malka or her little clan, Moses became a personage of prime importance, and was summoned at all hours of the day and night to wrestle with the angel Azrael.  When the angel had retired, worsted, after a match sometimes protracted into days, Moses relapsed into his primitive insignificance, and was dismissed with a mouthful of rum and a shilling.  It never seemed to him an unfair equivalent, for nobody could make less demand on the universe than Moses.  Give him two solid meals and three solid services a day, and he was satisfied, and he craved more for spiritual snacks between meals than for physical.

The last crisis had been brief, and there was so little danger that, when Milly’s child was circumcised, Moses had not even been bidden to the feast, though his piety would have made him the ideal sandek or god-father.  He did not resent this, knowing himself dust—­and that anything but gold-dust.

Moses had hardly emerged from the little arched passage which led to the Square, when sounds of strife fell upon his ears.  Two stout women chatting amicably at their doors, had suddenly developed a dispute.  In Zachariah Square, when you wanted to get to the bottom of a quarrel, the cue was not “find the woman,” but find the child.  The high-spirited bantlings had a way of pummelling one another in fistic duels, and of calling in their respective mothers when they got the worse of it—­which is cowardly, but human.  The mother of the beaten belligerent would then threaten to wring the “year,” or to twist the nose of the victorious party—­sometimes she did it.  In either case, the other mother would intervene, and then the two bantlings would retire into the background and leave their mothers to take up the duel while they resumed their interrupted game.