There were times when such tender breasts as Philip's were so nauseated by the persistent spitting that their hearts seemed to suspend beating from sheer sickness. On two occasions Philip's head fell back bloodlessly and with a bang on the hard wood behind him and he was taken away to the lavatory, where several men and women filled their mouths with water and cascaded his face for some minutes until he opened his eyes. No season in the year was hot enough to justify the opening of the windows. A current of the comparatively clean air from Doomington Road was declared with horror to be "A draught! A draught!" and with patriarchical fury the windows were closed to. Sometimes on a particularly sultry day an enterprising youth might open a window for several inches without drawing the attention of the elders. It would be unobserved for perhaps half an hour as no slightest movement of air was created. Then the alarm would be given. Immediately angry shouts of "A draught! A draught!" would be heard, some would huddle their arms in the cold, some would cough vehemently in the blizzard of self-suggestion. Occasionally the younger generation might make the effort to stand up shoulder to shoulder for the rights of ventilation, but so furious a hubbub would be created, the unease spreading itself into the women's department where a clucking would be heard as of an apprehensive farmyard; but especially the thunders of Mr. Linsky would be so olympically august, that the younger generation would subside and once more the opaque odours coagulate. The _Polisher Shool_ was, it may be deduced, a somewhat reactionary institution. But occasionally Reb Monash was called upon to deliver an oration in a synagogue of such Æsculapian sanity that the atmosphere seemed positively to evoke the vacant silence of Gentile worship. The definitely English congregations were assembled actually in superseded chapels, and here the laws of ventilation were no less rigorous than in the offices of the Doomington Board of Health. But these lacked the element of personality with which the _Polisher Shool_ was perhaps too copiously endowed. And if all his life Philip had not been made unceasingly conscious of the dislike entertained for him in cordial measure by the body politic of the synagogue, he would have derived much consolation from the study of its personalities, of the rotund Reb Yonah, of Reb Shimmon like an army with banners, and the wizened _shammos_, the beadle, flapping about on loose soles like a disreputable ghost.