They tear away their lovers from the maidens,
    Hi, hi, did-a-rid-a-ree!

The air mingled the melancholy of Polish music with the sadness of Jewish and the words hinted of God knew what.

    “Old unhappy far-off things
      And battles long ago.”

And so over all the songs and stories was the trail of tragedy, under all the heart-ache of a hunted race.  There are few more plaintive chants in the world than the recitation of the Psalms by the “Sons of the Covenant” on Sabbath afternoons amid the gathering shadows of twilight.  Esther often stood in the passage to hear it, morbidly fascinated, tears of pensive pleasure in her eyes.  Even the little jargon story-book which Moses Ansell read out that night to his Kinder, after tea-supper, by the light of the one candle, was prefaced with a note of pathos.  “These stories have we gathered together from the Gemorah and the Midrash, wonderful stories, and we have translated the beautiful stories, using the Hebrew alphabet so that every one, little or big, shall be able to read them, and shall know that there is a God in the world who forsaketh not His people Israel and who even for us will likewise work miracles and wonders and will send us the righteous Redeemer speedily in our days, Amen.”  Of this same Messiah the children heard endless tales.  Oriental fancy had been exhausted in picturing him for the consolation of exiled and suffering Israel.  Before his days there would be a wicked Messiah of the House of Joseph; later, a king with one ear deaf to hear good but acute to hear evil; there would be a scar on his forehead, one of his hands would be an inch long and the other three miles, apparently a subtle symbol of the persecutor.  The jargon story-book among its “stories, wonderful stories,” had also extracts from the famous romance, or diary, of Eldad the Danite, who professed to have discovered the lost Ten Tribes.  Eldad’s book appeared towards the end of the ninth century and became the Arabian Nights of the Jews, and it had filtered down through the ages into the Ansell garret, in common with many other tales from the rich storehouse of mediaeval folk-lore in the diffusion of which the wandering few has played so great a part.

Sometimes Moses read to his charmed hearers the description of Heaven and Hell by Immanuel, the friend and contemporary of Dante, sometimes a jargon version of Robinson Crusoe.  To-night he chose Eldad’s account of the tribe of Moses dwelling beyond the wonderful river, Sambatyon, which never flows on the Sabbath.

“There is also the tribe of Moses, our just master, which is called the tribe that flees, because it fled from idol worship and clung to the fear of God.  A river flows round their land for a distance of four days’ journey on every side.  They dwell in beautiful houses provided with handsome towers, which they have built themselves.  There is nothing unclean among them, neither in the case of birds, venison