* *

The School Management Committee sat formally to consider this
unprecedented episode. It was decided to cancel the attendance for the
day. Red marks, black marks--all fell into equality; the very ciphers
were reduced to their native nothingness. The school-week was made to
end on the Thursday.

Next Monday morning saw Bloomah at her desk, happiest of a radiant
sisterhood. On the wall shone the Banner.

THE BEARER OF BURDENS

THE BEARER OF BURDENS

I

When her Fanny did at last marry, Natalya--as everybody called the old
clo'-woman--was not over-pleased at the bargain. Natalya had imagined
beforehand that for a matronly daughter of twenty-three, almost past
the marrying age, any wedding would be a profitable transaction. But
when a husband actually presented himself, all the old dealer's
critical maternity was set a-bristle. Henry Elkman, she insisted, had
not a true Jewish air. There was in the very cut of his clothes a
subtle suggestion of going to the races.

It was futile of Fanny to insist that Henry had never gone to the
races, that his duties as bookkeeper of S. Cohn's Clothing Emporium
prevented him from going to the races, and that the cut of his clothes
was intended to give tone to his own establishment.

'Ah, yes, he does not take _thee_ to the races,' she insisted in
Yiddish. 'But all these young men with check suits and flowers in
their buttonholes bet and gamble and go to the bad, and their wives
and children fall back on their old mothers for support.'

'I shall not fall back on thee,' Fanny retorted angrily.

'And on whom else? A pretty daughter! Would you fall back on a
stranger? Or perhaps you are thinking of the Board of Guardians!' And
a shudder of humiliation traversed her meagre frame. For at sixty she
was already meagre, had already the appearance of the venerable
grandmother she was now to become, save that her hair, being only a
pious wig, remained rigidly young and black. Life had always gone hard
with her. Since her husband's death, when Fanny was a child, she had
scraped together a scanty livelihood by selling odds and ends for a
mite more than she gave for them. At the back doors of villas she
haggled with miserly mistresses, gentlewoman and old-clo' woman linked
by their common love of a bargain.

Natalya would sniff contemptuously at the muddle of ancient finery on
the floor and spurn it with her foot. 'How can I sell that?' she would
inquire. 'Last