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THE RABBI OF BACHARACH.
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great silver crucifixes. Before it ran boys clad in red and white gowns, bearing smoking censers of frankincense. In the midst, under a splendid canopy, were priests in white robes, bedecked with costly lace or in many-coloured stoles, and one of them held in his hand a sun-like golden vessel, which on arriving at a shrine by the market-corner he raised on high, while he half-sang, half-spoke in Latin—when all at once a little bell rang, and all around becoming silent fell on their knees and made the sign of the Cross. "Shut your eyes, Sara!" cried the Rabbi again, and hastily drew her away through a labyrinth of narrow and crooked streets, and at last over the desolate empty place which separated the new Jewish quarter from the rest of the city.

Before that time the Jews dwelt between the Dom or Cathedral and the bank of the Main, that is, from the bridge to the Lumpenbrunnen or Rag-fountain, and from the Mehlwage as far as Saint Bartholomew's. But the Catholic priests obtained a Papal bull forbidding the Jews to live so near the high church, for which reason the magistrates assigned them a place on the Wollgraben, where they built their present quarter. This was surrounded with high walls, and had iron chains before the gate to shut them in from the mob. Here they lived, crowded and oppressed, and with far more vivid memories of previous suffering than