ch grand chickens! Shining like gold! My heart
melted in me just looking at the flowing fatness of those chickens."

Hanneh Breineh smacked her thin, dry lips, a hungry gleam in her sunken
eyes.

"Fifty pounds!" she gasped. "It ain't possible. How do you know?"

"I heard her with my own ears. I saw them with my own eyes. And she said
she will chop up the chicken livers with onions and eggs for an
appetizer, and then she will buy twenty-five pounds of fish, and cook it
sweet and sour with raisins, and she said she will bake all her strudels
on pure chicken fat."

"Some people work themselves up in the world," sighed Hanneh Breineh.
"For them is America flowing with milk and honey. In Savel Mrs. Melker
used to get shriveled up from hunger. She and her children used to live
on potato peelings and crusts of dry bread picked out from the barrels;
and in America she lives to eat chicken, and apple strudels soaking in
fat."

"The world is a wheel always turning," philosophized Mrs. Pelz. "Those
who were high go down low, and those who've been low go up higher. Who
will believe me here in America that in Poland I was a cook in a
banker's house? I handled ducks and geese every day. I used to bake
coffee-cake with cream so thick you could cut it with a knife."

"And do you think I was a nobody in Poland?" broke in Hanneh Breineh,
tears welling in her eyes as the memories of her past rushed over her.
"But what's the use of talking? In America money is everything. Who
cares who my father or grandfather was in Poland? Without money I'm a
living dead one. My head dries out worrying how to get for the children
the eating a penny cheaper."

Mrs. Pelz wagged her head, a gnawing envy contracting her features.

"Mrs. Melker had it good from the day she came," she said begrudgingly.
"Right away she sent all her children to the factory, and she began to
cook meat for dinner every day. She and her children have eggs and
buttered rolls for breakfast each morning like millionaires."

A sudden fall and a baby's scream, and the boiler dropped from Hanneh
Breineh's hands as she rushed into her kitchen, Mrs. Pelz after her.
They found the high-chair turned on top of the baby.

"_Gevalt!_ Save me! Run for a doctor!" cried Hanneh Breineh as she
dragged the child from under the high-chair. "He's killed! He's killed!
My only child! My precious lamb!" she shrieked as she ran back and forth
with the screaming infant.

Mrs. Pelz snatched lit