the prey of the pickpocket

There was a kindly, weather-beaten old fellow with whom Esther had often chaffered job-lots when fortune smiled on the Ansells. Him, to her joy, Esther perceived--she saw a stack of gurnards on his improvised slab, and in imagination smelt herself frying them. Then a great shock as of a sudden icy douche traversed her frame, her heart seemed to stand still. For when she put her hand to her pocket to get her purse, she found but a thimble and a slate-pencil and a cotton handkerchief. It was some minutes before she could or would realize the truth that the four and sevenpence halfpenny on which so much depended was gone. Groceries and unleavened cakes Charity had given, raisin wine had been preparing for days, but fish and meat and all the minor accessories of a well-ordered Passover table--these were the prey of the pickpocket. A blank sense of desolation overcame the child, infinitely more horrible than that which she felt when she spilled the soup; the gurnards she could have touched with her finger seemed far off, inaccessible; in a moment more they and all things were blotted out by a hot rush of tears, and she was jostled as in a dream hither and thither by the double stream of crowd. Nothing since the death of Benjamin had given her so poignant a sense of the hollowness and uncertainty of existence. What would her father say, whose triumphant conviction that Providence had provided for his Passover was to be so rudely dispelled at the eleventh hour. Poor Moses! He had been so proud of having earned enough money to make a good _Yontov_, and was more convinced than ever that given a little capital to start with he could build up a colossal business! And now she would have to go home and spoil everybody's _Yontov_, and see the sour faces of her little ones round a barren _Seder_ table. Oh, it was terrible! and the child wept piteously, unheeded in the block, unheard amid the Babel.