y much of the honey,
which was mixed with wax and bees' wings. He ate while Moisey
Moisevitch and the Jewess looked at him and sighed.

"Where are you going, dearie?" asked the Jewess.

"To school," answered Yegorushka.

"And how many brothers and sisters have you got?"

"I am the only one; there are no others."

"O-oh!" sighed the Jewess, and turned her eyes upward. "Poor mamma,
poor mamma! How she will weep and miss you! We are going to send
our Nahum to school in a year. O-oh!"

"Ah, Nahum, Nahum!" sighed Moisey Moisevitch, and the skin of his
pale face twitched nervously. "And he is so delicate."

The greasy quilt quivered, and from beneath it appeared a child's
curly head on a very thin neck; two black eyes gleamed and stared
with curiosity at Yegorushka. Still sighing, Moisey Moisevitch and
the Jewess went to the chest of drawers and began talking in Yiddish.
Moisey Moisevitch spoke in a low bass undertone, and altogether his
talk in Yiddish was like a continual "ghaal-ghaal-ghaal-ghaal, . . ."
while his wife answered him in a shrill voice like a turkeycock's,
and the whole effect of her talk was something like "Too-too-too-too!"
While they were consulting, another little curly head on a thin
neck peeped out of the greasy quilt, then a third, then a fourth.
. . . If Yegorushka had had a fertile imagination he might have
imagined that the hundred-headed hydra was hiding under the quilt.

"Ghaal-ghaal-ghaal-ghaal!" said Moisey Moisevitch.

"Too-too-too-too!" answered the Jewess.

The consultation ended in the Jewess's diving with a deep sigh into
the chest of drawers, and, unwrapping some sort of green rag there,
she took out a big rye cake made in the shape of a heart.

"Take it, dearie," she said, giving Yegorushka the cake; "you have
no mamma now--no one to give you nice things."

Yegorushka stuck the cake in his pocket and staggered to the door,
as he could not go on breathing the foul, sour air in which the
innkeeper and his wife lived. Going back to the big room, he settled
himself more comfortably on the sofa and gave up trying to check
his straying thoughts.

As soon as Kuzmitchov had finished counting out the notes he put
them back into the bag. He did not treat them very respectfully and
stuffed them into the dirty sack without ceremony, as indifferently
as though they had not been money but waste paper.

Father Christopher was talking to Solomon.

"Well, Solomon the Wise!" he said, yawn