BOOK I.

CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.

CHAPTER I.

THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION.

A dead and gone wag called the street “Fashion Street,” and most of the people who live in it do not even see the joke.  If it could exchange names with “Rotten Row,” both places would be more appropriately designated.  It is a dull, squalid, narrow thoroughfare in the East End of London, connecting Spitalfields with Whitechapel, and branching off in blind alleys.  In the days when little Esther Ansell trudged its unclean pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the blasphemies from some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in the capital of the civilized world.  Some of these clotted spiders’-webs have since been swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the spiders have scurried off into darker crannies.

There were the conventional touches about the London street-picture, as Esther Ansell sped through the freezing mist of the December evening, with a pitcher in her hand, looking in her oriental coloring like a miniature of Rebecca going to the well.  A female street-singer, with a trail of infants of dubious maternity, troubled the air with a piercing melody; a pair of slatterns with arms a-kimbo reviled each other’s relatives; a drunkard lurched along, babbling amiably; an organ-grinder, blue-nosed as his monkey, set some ragged children jigging under the watery rays of a street-lamp.  Esther drew her little plaid shawl tightly around her, and ran on without heeding these familiar details, her chilled feet absorbing the damp of the murky pavement through the worn soles of her cumbrous boots.  They were masculine boots, kicked off by some intoxicated tramp and picked up by Esther’s father.  Moses Ansell had a habit of lighting on windfalls, due, perhaps, to his meek manner of walking with bent head, as though literally bowed beneath the yoke of the Captivity.  Providence rewarded him for his humility by occasional treasure-trove.  Esther had received a pair of new boots from her school a week before, and the substitution, of the tramp’s foot-gear for her own resulted in a net profit of half-a-crown, and kept Esther’s little brothers and sisters in bread for a week.  At school, under her teacher’s eye, Esther was very unobtrusive about the feet for the next fortnight, but as the fear of being found out died away, even her rather morbid conscience condoned the deception in view of the stomachic gain.

They gave away bread and milk at the school, too, but Esther and her brothers and sisters never took either, for fear of being thought in want of them.  The superiority of a class-mate is hard to bear, and a high-spirited child will not easily acknowledge starvation in presence of a roomful of purse-proud urchins, some of them able to spend a farthing a day on pure luxuries.  Moses Ansell would have been