nds
and sponsors for full-length double-breasted sealskin coats for the
sweet sixteens and more.

He was as tall as Napoleon, with a round, un-Napoleonic head,
close-shaved so that his short-nap hair grew tight like moss on a rock,
and a beard that defied every hirsute precaution by pricking darkly
through the lower half of his face as phenomenally as the first
grass-blades of spring push out in an hour.

"Let me fix you a little something, Abie. I got grand broth in the
ice-box--all I need to do is to heat it."

"Ain't I told you I ain't hungry, mamma?"

"When that boy don't eat he's sick. I should worry yet! Poor papa! If
he'd listened to me he'd be living to-day. I'm your worst enemy--I am! I
work against my own child--that's the thanks what I get."

Sappho, who never wore a gingham wrapper and whose throat was unwrinkled
and full of music, never sang more surely than did Mrs. Ginsburg into
the heart-cells of her son. He reached out for her wrapper and drew her
to him.

"Aw, mamma, you know I don't mean nothing; just when you get all worried
over nothing it makes me mad. Come, sit down by me."

"To-night we don't go up to Washeims'. I care a lot for Yetta's
talk--her Beulah this and her Beulah that! It makes me sick!"

"I'll take you up, mamma, if you want to go."

"Indeed, you stay where you are! For their front steps and refreshments
I don't need to ride in the Subway to Harlem anyway."

"What's the difference? A little evening's pleasure won't hurt you,
mamma."

"Such a lunch as she served last time! I got better right now in my
ice-box, and I ain't expecting company. They can buy and sell us, too, I
guess. Sol Washeim don't take a nine-room house when boys' pants ain't
booming--but such a lunch as she served! You can believe me, I wouldn't
have the nerve to. Abie, I see Herschey's got fall cloth-tops in their
windows already."

"Yes?"

"Good business to-day--not, Abie?--and such heat too! Mrs. Abrahams
called across the hallway just now that she was in for a pair; but you
was so busy with a customer she couldn't wait--that little pink-haired
clerk, with her extravagant ways, had to go off and leave you in the
heat! Shoe-buttoners she puts in every box like they cost nothing. I
told her so last week, too."

"She's a grand little clerk, mamma--such a business head I never seen!"

"Like I couldn't have come down and helped you to-day! Believe me--when
I was in the store with papa, Abie, we wasn't