ll ten. There was an hour for
dinner and play at noon. Good little boys played quietly in their
places, but most of the boys ran out of the house and jumped and
yelled and quarrelled.

There was nothing in what the boys did in heder that I could not have
done--if I had not been a girl. For a girl it was enough if she could
read her prayers in Hebrew, and follow the meaning by the Yiddish
translation at the bottom of the page. It did not take long to learn
this much,--a couple of terms with a rebbetzin (female teacher),--and
after that she was done with books.

A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen. There she learned
to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider; also to spin
and weave, in country places. And while her hands were busy, her
mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household
and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife; for, of course, every
girl hoped to be a wife. A girl was born for no other purpose.

How soon it came, the pious burden of wifehood! One day the girl is
playing forfeits with her laughing friends, the next day she is missed
from the circle. She has been summoned to a conference with the
shadchan (marriage broker), who has been for months past advertising
her housewifely talents, her piety, her good looks, and her marriage
portion, among families with marriageable sons. Her parents are
pleased with the son-in-law proposed by the shadchan, and now, at the
last, the girl is brought in, to be examined and appraised by the
prospective parents-in-law. If the negotiations go off smoothly, the
marriage contract is written, presents are exchanged between the
engaged couple, through their respective parents, and all that is left
the girl of her maidenhood is a period of busy preparation for the
wedding.

[Illustration: HEDER (HEBREW SCHOOL) FOR BOYS IN POLOTZK]

If the girl is well-to-do, it is a happy interval, spent in visits to
the drapers and tailors, in collecting linens and featherbeds and
vessels of copper and brass. The former playmates come to inspect the
trousseau, enviously fingering the silks and velvets of the
bride-elect. The happy heroine tries on frocks and mantles before her
glass, blushing at references to the wedding day; and to the question,
"How do you like the bridegroom?" she replies, "How should I know?
There was such a crowd at the betrothal that I didn't see him."

Marriage was a sacrament with us Jews in the Pale. To rear