The worshipper now climbed a narrow staircase, and passing by the women's door entered the synagogue proper. If he had endured some recent loss in his family, the beadle from within would declare robustly, "Look ye towards the bereaved one!" who would enter with drooped head, the object of the regulated curiosity of bearded and beardless alike. Only a thin wooden partition divided the women's from the men's section, so that on one side praise was lifted to the Lord by the women because He had made them what they were, on the other, in unabashed juxtaposition, heartier praise was lifted by the men because He had made them men. Little boys could stand quite easily upon the forms and look down upon the women swaying in their old black silks and beneath their crazy cherry-garlanded bonnets. Here stood the _rebitsin_, Serra Golda, the most pious and wrinkled of Hebrew woman, who, because it is a _mitzvah_, an act of grace, to stand as long as possible during the Day of Atonement, stood all that hot long day on her ulcered feet, even though the mere creeping from her own dun parlour not far away had been one hard agony. Here too stood Mrs. Massel, very quiet and shy among the voluble women, wiping her eyes sometimes and repeating the prayers quietly, or perhaps, becoming conscious of the dark watchful scrutiny of her boy beyond the partition, lifting to him her face for one sweet moment and dropping it again towards her Prayer Book. Against the centre of the Eastern wall, which was at right angles with this partition, stood the Ark wherein the Scrolls of the Law reposed among mothy velvet, themselves enveloped in a petticoat of plush whence hung silver bells. The whole Ark was curtained by a pall of scarlet, lettered with gold thread. At the centre of the masculine section (whose dimensions were some fifty by forty feet) stood the pulpit, some inches above the general level, where the whole service was incanted and the occasional auxiliaries from the audience were summoned. Below the pulpit and facing the Ark, a coffin-like desk drawn closely against their amplitudes, sat the elected officers for the year, the _parnass_ and the two _gabboim_. Reb Monash, the power of whose oratory was so signal an ornament to the _Polisher Shool_, sat upon the right-hand side of the Ark itself, against the wall. The benches ran parallel along the _shool_ on both sides of the pulpit. In the strict, if uncongenial, interests of truth it is necessary to say that every member of the synagogue above the age of thirty spat, and not a few below that age, these last retaining the easier hygiene of Poland and further Europe. The more honourable worthies had their own particular joints in the boarding for their expectorations, although, if they were more than usually afflicted, they would proceed to the doorway, returning thence purged. Hence experience alone was an adequate pilot for an unscathed journey between any point of the synagogue and the door.