They always celebrated his return from a commercial round by going to the theatre—­the-etter they pronounced it.  They went to the pit of the West End houses rather than patronize the local dress circles for the same money.  There were two strata of Ghetto girls, those who strolled in the Strand on Sabbath, and those who strolled in the Whitechapel Road.  Leah was of the upper stratum.  She was a tall lovely brunette, exuberant of voice and figure, with coarse red hands.  She doted on ice-cream in the summer, and hot chocolate in the winter, but her love of the theatre was a perennial passion.  Both Sam and she had good ears, and were always first in the field with the latest comic opera tunes.  Leah’s healthy vitality was prodigious.  There was a legend in the Lane of such a maiden having been chosen by a coronet; Leah was satisfied with Sam, who was just her match.  On the heels of Sam came several other guests, notably Mrs. Jacobs (wife of “Reb” Shemuel), with her pretty daughter, Hannah.  Mr. Hyams, the Cohen, came last—­the Priest whose functions had so curiously dwindled since the times of the Temples.  To be called first to the reading of the Law, to bless his brethren with symbolic spreadings of palms and fingers in a mystic incantation delivered, standing shoeless before the Ark of the Covenant at festival seasons, to redeem the mother’s first-born son when neither parent was of priestly lineage—­these privileges combined with a disability to be with or near the dead, differentiated his religious position from that of the Levite or the Israelite.  Mendel Hyams was not puffed up about his tribal superiority, though if tradition were to be trusted, his direct descent from Aaron, the High Priest, gave him a longer genealogy than Queen Victoria’s.  He was a meek sexagenarian, with a threadbare black coat and a child-like smile.  All the pride of the family seemed to be monopolized by his daughter Miriam, a girl whose very nose Heaven had fashioned scornful.  Miriam had accompanied him out of contemptuous curiosity.  She wore a stylish feather in her hat, and a boa round her throat, and earned thirty shillings a week, all told, as a school teacher. (Esther Ansell was in her class just now.) Probably her toilette had made old Hyams unpunctual.  His arrival was the signal for the commencement of the proceedings, and the men hastened to assume their head-gear.

Ephraim Phillips cautiously took the swaddled-up infant from the bosom of Milly where it was suckling and presented it to old Hyams.  Fortunately Ezekiel had already had a repletion of milk, and was drowsy and manifested very little interest in the whole transaction.

“This my first-born son,” said Ephraim in Hebrew as he handed Ezekiel over—­“is the first-born of his mother, and the Holy One, blessed be He, hath given command to redeem him, as it is said, and those that are to be redeemed of them from a month old, shalt thou redeem according to thine estimation for the money of five shekels after the shekel of the sanctuary, the shekel being twenty gerahs; and it is said, ’Sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast; it is mine.’”