“Certainly not,” thundered Malka.  “I knew old Benjamin well, and he sent me a pair of chintz curtains when I married your father.”

“Poor old Benjamin!  How long has he been dead?” mused Reb Shemuel’s wife.

“He died the year I was confined with my Leah——­”

“Stop! stop!” interrupted Sam Levine boisterously.  “There’s Leah getting as red as fire for fear you’ll blab out her age.”

“Don’t be a fool, Sam,” said Leah, blushing violently, and looking the lovelier for it.

The attention of the entire company was now concentrated upon the question at issue, whatever it might be.  Malka fixed her audience with her piercing eye, and said in a tone that scarce brooked contradiction:  “Hyam Robins couldn’t have married Shmool’s sister because Shmool’s sister was already the wife of Abraham the fishmonger.”

“Yes, but Shmool had two sisters,” said Mrs. Jacobs, audaciously asserting her position as the rival genealogist.

“Nothing of the kind,” replied Malka warmly.

“I’m quite sure,” persisted Mrs. Jacobs.  “There was Phoeby and there was Harriet.”

“Nothing of the kind,” repeated Malka.  “Shmool had three sisters.  Only two were in the deaf and dumb home.”

“Why, that, wasn’t Shmool at all,” Milly forgot herself so far as to say, “that was Block the Baker.”

“Of course!” said Malka in her most acid tone.  “My kinder always know better than me.”

There was a moment of painful silence.  Malka’s eye mechanically sought the clothes-brush.  Then Ezekiel sneezed.  It was a convulsive “atichoo,” and agitated the infant to its most intimate flannel-roll.

“For thy Salvation do I hope, O Lord,” murmured Malka, piously, adding triumphantly aloud, “There! the kind has sneezed to the truth of it.  I knew I was right.”

The sneeze of an innocent child silences everybody who is not a blasphemer.  In the general satisfaction at the unexpected solution of the situation, no one even pointed out that the actual statement to which Ezekiel had borne testimony, was an assertion of the superior knowledge of Malka’s children.  Shortly afterwards the company trooped downstairs to partake of high tea, which in the Ghetto need not include anything more fleshly than fish.  Fish was, indeed, the staple of the meal.  Fried fish, and such fried fish!  Only a great poet could sing the praises of the national dish, and the golden age of Hebrew poetry is over.  Strange that Gebirol should have lived and died without the opportunity of the theme, and that the great Jehuda Halevi himself should have had to devote his genius merely to singing the glories of Jerusalem.  “Israel is among the other nations,” he sang, “as the heart among the limbs.”  Even so is the fried fish of Judaea to the fried fish of Christendom and Heathendom.  With the audacity of true culinary genius, Jewish fried fish is always served cold.  The skin is