But far more vividly did she realize that she was an English girl; far keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and Wellington; she rejoiced to find that her ancestors had always beaten the French from the days of Cressy and Poictiers to the days of Waterloo, that Alfred the Great was the wisest of kings, and that Englishmen dominated the world and had planted colonies in every corner of it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs, and everything worth inventing.  Esther absorbed these ideas from the school reading books.  The experience of a month will overlay the hereditary bequest of a century.  And yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains most sensitive to the old impressions.

Sarah and Isaac had developed as distinct individualities as was possible in the time at their disposal.  Isaac was just five and Sarah—­who had never known her mother—­just four.  The thoughts of both ran strongly in the direction of sensuous enjoyment, and they preferred baked potatoes, especially potatoes touched with gravy, to all the joys of the kindergarten.  Isaac’s ambition ran in the direction of eider-down beds such as he had once felt at Malka’s and Moses soothed him by the horizon-like prospect of such a new bed.  Places of honor had already been conceded by the generous little chap to his father and brother.  Heaven alone knows how he had come to conceive their common bed as his own peculiar property in which the other three resided at night on sufferance.  He could not even plead it was his by right of birth in it.  But Isaac was not after all wholly given over to worldly thoughts, for an intellectual problem often occupied his thoughts and led him to slap little Sarah’s arms.  He had been born on the 4th of December while Sarah had been born a year later on the 3d.

“It ain’t, it can’t be,” he would say.  “Your birfday can’t be afore mine.”

“’Tis, Esty thays so,” Sarah would reply.

“Esty’s a liar,” Isaac responded imperturbably.

“Ask Tatah.”

“Tatah dunno.  Ain’t I five?”

“Yeth.”

“And ain’t you four?”

“Yeth.”

“And ain’t I older than you?”

“Courth.”

“And wasn’t I born afore you?”

“Yeth, Ikey.”

“Then ’ow can your birfday come afore mine?”

“’Cos it doth.”

“Stoopid!”

“It doth, arx Esty,” Sarah would insist.

“Than’t teep in my new bed,” Ikey would threaten.

“Thall if I like.”

“Than’t!”

Here Sarah would generally break down in tears and Isaac with premature economic instinct, feeling it wicked to waste a cry, would proceed to justify it by hitting her.  Thereupon little Sarah would hit him back and develop a terrible howl.

“Hi, woe is unto me,” she would wail in jargon, throwing herself on the ground in a corner and rocking herself to and fro like her far-away ancestresses remembering Zion by the waters of Babylon.