'Twas the tenth day, and an awful sense of sacred doom hung over the Ghetto. In every house a gigantic wax taper had burnt, white and solemn, all through the night, and fowls or coins had been waved round the heads of the people in atonement for their iniquities. The morning dawned gray and cold, but with the dawn the population was astir, for the services began at six in the morning and lasted without intermission till seven at night. Many of the male worshippers were clad in their grave-clothes, and the extreme zealots remained standing all day long, swaying to and fro and beating their breasts at the confessions of sin. For a long time the boy wished to stand too, but the crowded synagogue reeked with heavy odors, and at last, towards mid-day, faint and feeble, he had to sit. But to fast till nightfall he was resolved. Hitherto he had always broken his fast at some point in the services, going home round the corner to delicious bread and fish. When he was seven or eight this breakfast came at mid-day, but the older he grew the longer he fasted, and it became a point of honor to beat his record every successive year. Last time he had brought his breakfast down till late in the afternoon, and now it would be unforgivable if he could not see the fast out and go home, proud and sinless, to drink wine with the men. He turned so pale, as the afternoon service dragged itself along, that his father begged him again and again to go home and eat. But the boy was set on a full penance. And every now and again he forgot his headache and the gnawing at his stomach in the fervor of passionate prayer and in the fascination of the ghostly figures weeping and wailing in the gloomy synagogue, and once in imagination he saw the heavens open overhead and God sitting on the judgment throne, invisible by excess of dazzling light, and round him the four-winged cherubim and the fiery wheels and the sacred creatures singing "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory." Then a great awe brooded over the synagogue, and the vast forces of the universe seemed concentred about it, as if all creation was awaiting in tense silence for the terrible words of judgment. And then he felt some cool, sweet scent sprinkled on his forehead, and, as from the far ends of the world, he heard a voice that sounded like his father's asking him if he felt better. He opened his eyes and smiled faintly, and said nothing was the matter, but now his father insisted that he must go home to eat. So, still dazed by the glories he had seen, he dragged himself dreamily through the press of swaying, weeping worshippers, over whom there still seemed to brood some vast, solemn awe, and came outside into the little square and drew in a delicious breath of fresh air, his eyes blinking at the sudden glare of sunlight and blue sky. But the sense of awe was still with him, for the Ghetto was deserted, the shops were shut, and a sacred hush of silence was over the stones