Her jam
pancakes and almond-rolls are praised by all, and what cakes are left
over from the Veiling Ceremony are either snatched one by one, or else
they are seized wholesale by the young people standing round the table,
so that she should not see, and they laugh and tease her. That is the
way to become a mother-in-law! And here, of course, the whole of the
pancakes and sweet-cakes and almond-rolls which she brought have never
so much as been unpacked, and are to be thrown away or taken home again,
as you please! A shame! No one came to her for cakes. The wig, too, may
be thrown away or carried back--Moishehle told her it was not required,
it wouldn't quite do. The bride accepted the silver candlesticks with
embarrassment, as though Gittel had done something to make her feel
awkward, and some girls who were standing by smiled, "Regina has been
given candlesticks for the candle-blessing on Fridays--ha, ha, ha!"

The bridal couple with the girl's parents came in to ask how she felt,
and interrupted the current of her thoughts.

"We shall drive home now, people are leaving," they said.

"The wedding is over," they told her, "everything in life comes to a
speedy end."

Gittel remembered that when Avremel was married, the festivities had
lasted a whole week, till over the second cheerful Sabbath, when the
bride, the new daughter-in-law, was led to the Shool!

The day after the wedding Gittel drove home, sad, broken in spirit, as
people return from the cemetery where they have buried a child, where
they have laid a fragment of their own heart, of their own life, under
the earth.

Driving home in the carriage, she consoled herself with this at least:

"A good thing that Beile and Zlatke, Avremel and Yossel were not there.
The shame will be less, there will be less talk, nobody will know what I
am suffering."

Gittel arrived the picture of gloom.

When she left for the wedding, she had looked suddenly twenty years
younger, and now she looked twenty years older than before!

POVERTY

I was living in Mezkez at the time, and Seinwill Bookbinder lived there
too.

But Heaven only knows where he is now! Even then his continual pallor
augured no long residence in Mezkez, and he was a Yadeschlever Jew with
a wife and six small children, and he lived by binding books.

Who knows what has become of him! But that is not the question--I only
want to prove that Seinwill was a great liar.

If he is already in the o