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On either side of, and frequently several feet below, these highways are mud paths, along which pedestrians wend a varied way, avoiding cesspools, stepping over transverse timbers or circumventing squatters' huts, showered on the while by splashings from the highroad or blinded by clouds of refuse-laden dust.
Little children took to him, and he showered sweetmeats upon them and winning smiles of love. When he walked the refuse-laden, deep-rutted streets, slow and brooding, jostled by porters, asses, dervishes, sheiks, scribes, fruit-pedlars, shrouded females, and beggars, something more than the sombreness of his robes marked him out from the medley of rainbow-colored pedestrians.
And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour? fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals.
No prophetic centre, this Zion, even for Israel; only the stagnant, stereotyped activity of excommunicating Rabbis, and the capricious distribution of the paralyzing Chalukah, leaving an appalling multitudinous poverty agonizing in the steep refuse-laden alleys.
"The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted Street," thought Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd. Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street. Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.
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