“Well, strike me lucky!  What a fool I was not to rekkernize ’im!” His battered face brightened up.  “No wonder he licked me!”

Except for the comparative infrequency of the more bestial types of men and women, Judaea has always been a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and “fences,” its gymnasts and money-lenders, its scholars and stockbrokers, its musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints, publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors, foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank. Nihil alienum a se Judaeus putat.

Joe and his friend fell to recalling Dutch Sam’s great feats.  Each out-vied the other in admiration for the supreme pugilist.

Next day Sleepy Sol came rampaging down the courtyard.  He walked at the rate of five miles to the hour, and despite the weight of his bag his head pointed to the zenith.

“Clo’!” he shrieked.  “Clo’!”

Joe the hostler came out.  His head was bandaged, and in his hand was gold lace.  It was something even to do business with a hero’s father-in-law.

But it is given to few men to marry their daughters to champion boxers:  and as Dutch Sam was not a Don Quixote, the average peddler or huckster never enjoyed the luxury of prancing gait and cock-a-hoop business cry.  The primitive fathers of the Ghetto might have borne themselves more jauntily had they foreseen that they were to be the ancestors of mayors and aldermen descended from Castilian hidalgos and Polish kings, and that an unborn historian would conclude that the Ghetto of their day was peopled by princes in disguise.  They would have been as surprised to learn who they were as to be informed that they were orthodox.  The great Reform split did not occur till well on towards the middle of the century, and the Jews of those days were unable to conceive that a man could be a Jew without eating kosher meat, and they would have looked upon the modern distinctions between racial and religious Jews as the sophistries of the convert or the missionary.  If their religious life converged to the Great Shool, their social life focussed on Petticoat Lane, a long, narrow thoroughfare which, as late as Strype’s day, was lined with beautiful trees:  vastly more pleasant they must have been than the faded barrows and beggars of after days.  The Lane—­such was its affectionate sobriquet—­was the stronghold of hard-shell Judaism, the Alsatia of “infidelity” into which no missionary dared set foot, especially no apostate-apostle.  Even in modern days the new-fangled Jewish minister of the fashionable suburb, rigged out, like the Christian clergyman, has been mistaken for such a Meshumad, and pelted with gratuitous vegetables and eleemosynary eggs.  The Lane was always the great market-place, and every insalubrious street and alley abutting on it was covered with the overflowings of its commerce and its mud.  Wentworth