gagement since Belcovitch's eldest daughter
betrothed herself to Pesach Weingott."

"Oh, these Jewish young men!" said the Rebbitzin. "Look at my Hannah--as
pretty a girl as you could meet in the whole Lane--and yet here she is
wasting her youth."

Hannah bit her lip, instead of her bread and butter, for she felt she
had brought the talk on herself. She had heard the same grumblings from
her mother for two years. Mrs. Jacobs's maternal anxiety had begun when
her daughter was seventeen. "When _I_ was seventeen," she went on, "I
was a married woman. Now-a-days the girls don't begin to get a _Chosan_
till they're twenty."

"We are not living in Poland," the Reb reminded her.

"What's that to do with it? It's the Jewish young men who want to marry
gold."

"Why blame them? A Jewish young man can marry several pieces of gold,
but since Rabbenu Gershom he can only marry one woman," said the Reb,
laughing feebly and forcing his humor for his daughter's sake.

"One woman is more than thou canst support," said the Rebbitzin,
irritated into Yiddish, "giving away the flesh from off thy children's
bones. If thou hadst been a proper father thou wouldst have saved thy
money for Hannah's dowry, instead of wasting it on a parcel of vagabond
_Schnorrers_. Even so I can give her a good stock of bedding and
under-linen. It's a reproach and a shame that thou hast not yet found
her a husband. Thou canst find husbands quick enough for other men's
daughters!"

"I found a husband for thy father's daughter," said the Reb, with a
roguish gleam in his brown eyes.

"Don't throw that up to me! I could have got plenty better. And my
daughter wouldn't have known the shame of finding nobody to marry her.
In Poland at least the youths would have flocked to marry her because
she was a Rabbi's daughter, and they'd think It an honor to be a
son-in-law of a Son of the Law. But in this godless country! Why in my
village the Chief Rabbi's daughter, who was so ugly as to make one spit
out, carried off the finest man in the district."

"But thou, my Simcha, hadst no need to be connected with Rabbonim!"

"Oh, yes; make mockery of me."

"I mean it. Thou art as a lily of Sharon."

"Wilt thou have another cup of coffee, Shemuel?"

"Yes, my life. Wait but a little and thou shalt see our Hannah under the
_Chuppah_."

"Hast thou any one in thine eye?"

The Reb nodded his head mysteriously and winked the eye, as if nudging
the person in it.

"Who