ne. They know very well
that no girl would hit a complete stranger, and that the blow only
meant, "Impudent boy, why need the world know of anything between us?"

Shloimehle Shieber, armed with the shovels, stands still for a minute
trying to distinguish Sossye's voice in the peals of laughter. The
Matzes under his care are browning in the oven.

And Sossye takes it into her head to make her Matzes with one pointed
corner, so that he may perhaps know them for hers, and laughs to herself
as she does so.

There is one table to the side of the room which was not there last
year; it was placed there for the formerly well-to-do housemistresses,
who last year, when they came to bake their Matzes, gave Yom-tov money
to the others. Here all goes on quietly; the laughter of the merry
people breaks against the silence, and is swallowed up.

The work grows continually pleasanter and more animated. The riddler
stamps two or three Matzes with hieroglyphs at once, in order to show
off. Shloimeh at the oven cannot keep pace with him, and grows angry:

"May all bad...."

The wish is cut short in his mouth, he has caught a glance of Sossye's
through the door of the baking-room, he answers with two, gets three
back, Sossye pursing her lips to signify a kiss. Shloimeh folds his
hands, which also means something.

Meantime ten Matzes get scorched, and one of Sossye's is pulled in two.
"Brennen brennt mir mein Harz," starts a worker singing in a plaintive
key.

"Come! hush, hush!" scolds old Berke. "Songs, indeed! What next, you
impudent boy?"

"My sorrows be on their head!" sighs a neighbor of Sossye's. "They'd
soon be tired of their life, if they were me. I've left two children at
home fit to scream their hearts out. The other is at the breast, I have
brought it along. It is quiet just now, by good luck."

"What is the use of a poor woman's having children?" exclaims another,
evidently "expecting" herself. Indeed, she has a child a year--and a
seven-days' mourning a year afterwards.

"Do you suppose I ask for them? Do you think I cry my eyes out for them
before God?"

"If she hasn't any, who's to inherit her place at the Matzes-baking--a
hundred years hence?"

"All very well for you to talk, _you're_ a grass-widow (to no Jewish
daughter may it apply!)!"

"May such a blow be to my enemies as he'll surely come back again!"

"It's about time! After three years!"

"Will you shut up, or do you want another beating?"

Sos