“Here, sir! Why dirty the dear little feet of your horse? Here is Jewish velvet for them.”
“Thank you, my dear girl, but you had better go home,” the lieutenant answered, smiling. A crumpled mass of unrolled fabrics, silk, woollen, velvet, satin, cotton, lay in many-coloured heaps on the pavement and in the gutter. The rioters, whose movements were still amateurish and lacked snap, soon wearied of the job. Several of them then broke into a grocery store and brought forth a barrel of kerosene.
“What are you going to do?” asked the lieutenant.
“We’ll pour it over the stuff and set fire to it, your high nobleness.”
“That you can’t do,” the officer returned decisively. “You’ll have to go home now.”
The rioters obeyed at once, many of them taking rolls of silk or velvet along.