Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/149

 people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as much a part of the constitution of things as clouds and horses. The semi-celestial variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a whole house. Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive broad-cloth, and radiating an indefinable aroma of super-*humanity, sometimes came to the school, preceded by the beaming Head Mistress; and then all the little girls rose and curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as average members of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by their intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and the disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two species ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But the dullest of the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a good-humored contempt for the unworldliness of the semi-divine persons, who spoke to them as if they were not going to recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's hair, and copying one another's sums, and stealing one another's needles, the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.

No. 5 John Street

(English author and journalist, born 1840. The volume here quoted is one of the most amazing pictures of slum-life ever penned)

After midnight the gangs return in carousal from the gin shops, the more thoughtful of them with stored liquor for the morning draft. Now it is three stages of man—no more: man gushing, confiding, uplifted, as he