Thus was No. 1 Royal Street close packed with the stuff of human life, homespun and drab enough, but not altogether profitless, may be, to turn over and examine.  So close packed was it that there was scarce breathing space.  It was only at immemorial intervals that our pauper alien made a pun, but one day he flashed upon the world the pregnant remark that England was well named, for to the Jew it was verily the Enge-Land, which in German signifies the country without elbow room.  Moses Ansell chuckled softly and beatifically when he emitted the remark that surprised all who knew him.  But then it was the Rejoicing of the Law and the Sons of the Covenant had treated him to rum and currant cake.  He often thought of his witticism afterwards, and it always lightened his unwashed face with a happy smile.  The recollection usually caught him when he was praying.

For four years after Mrs. Ansell’s charity funeral the Ansells, though far from happy, had no history to speak of.

Benjamin accompanied Solomon to Shool morning and evening to say Kaddish for their mother till he passed into the Orphan Asylum and out of the lives of his relatives.  Solomon and Rachel and Esther went to the great school and Isaac to the infant school, while the tiny Sarah, whose birth had cost Mrs. Ansell’s life, crawled and climbed about in the garret, the grandmother coming in negatively useful as a safeguard against fire on the days when the grate was not empty.  The Rube’s own conception of her function as a safeguard against fire was quite other.

Moses was out all day working or looking for work, or praying or listening to Drashes, by the Maggid or other great preachers.  Such charities as brightened and warmed the Ghetto Moses usually came in for.  Bread, meat and coal tickets, god-sends from the Society for Restoring the Soul, made odd days memorable.  Blankets were not so easy to get as in the days of poor Gittel’s confinements.

What little cooking there was to do was done by Esther before or after school; she and her children usually took their mid-day meal with them in the shape of bread, occasionally made ambrosial by treacle The Ansells had more fast days than the Jewish calendar, which is saying a good deal.  Providence, however, generally stepped in before the larder had been bare twenty-four hours.

As the fast days of the Jewish calendar did not necessarily fall upon the Ansell fast days, they were an additional tax on Moses and his mother.  Yet neither ever wavered in the scrupulous observance of them, not a crumb of bread nor a drop of water passing their lips.  In the keen search for facts detrimental to the Ghetto it is surprising that no political economist has hitherto exposed the abundant fasts with which Israel has been endowed, and which obviously operate as a dole in aid of wages.  So does the Lenten period of the “Three Weeks,” when meat is prohibited in memory of the shattered Temples.