Zorn handed him a few more coins and cleared his throat as if something was choking him. Schultz led the horses by the bridles a few steps. There was another guardhouse inside the gates. “Dovidle, stick your nose out—a couple of Jews for Easter,” the guard called in a piping, mimicking, sneering voice, and pounded on the casement. A door opened and out came a little man. The little man greeted Zorn kindly, extending his hand. “You must have come a great distance or you would have known better than to come so late.” “Since when have they re-established the Ghetto?” asked Zorn tremblingly. “As soon as they chased the French out,” replied Dovidle in a saddened, low voice. “Yes, they have hemmed us in again;” the little man sighed. “They are at their old tricks again, fleecing and torturing our poor people. Oh, God, will there ever be an end?” Albert trembled in every limb, a piercing pain shot through his head. He had read of the miserable Ghettoes, which were abolished as soon as Napoleon’s troops occupied the Rhenish provinces, but he had never thought of himself as belonging to a segregated people. He had long forgotten the taunts of Long Kunz and Shorty Fritz. In his native city he had never thought, and was never reminded, of his ancestry. His parents’ indifference to creed had made him almost forget it himself. The driver soon mounted the box, clacked his tongue, and moved on. They proceeded slowly through a long, narrow street —it seemed to Albert interminably long and exceedingly narrow—the buildings on either side high and close together. It was dark—depressingly dark—with an occasional candle light peeping through a window. Not infrequently there was the sound of footsteps which was quickly drowned by the heavier tread of the horses. A door opened now and then—dabs of yellow against a black curtain—a slam, and silence again . . . II. Although warned not to wander alone through the streets outside the Judengasse, Albert’s curiosity got the better of him. No sooner was his father gone to see the banker, to whom Albert was to be apprenticed, than the boy left the tavern. He followed the long stream of people toward the gate at the end of the Judengasse. There were three gates in the enclosure, but this gate led to the Wollgraben, beyond which was the Fair. He rambled aimlessly staring around him. He was proceeding along the banks of the Main, which was thronged with a thousand noisy traders, small vessels of antiquated design slowly moving to the accompaniment of the quaint cries of the steersmen. The tumult was deafening. Porters with high loads on their heads crying at the jostling crowd to make way; trundling bales, chests, caskets: yells of warning for the passersby to stand back: quarreling, half-naked boatmen; scolding red-coated officials, leaping from vessel to vessel on their tours of inspection: rattling of chains, plunging of anchors . . .