see
Moe Rabiner, Mawruss. He looks at that fiddle for pretty near half an
hour. He turns it upside down and he blows into it and he takes his
finger and wets it and rubs on it, and he smells it, and _Gott weiss_
what he don't do with it."

"He's a dangerous feller, Abe," Morris commented. "He don't never stop
at nothing to sell goods."

"Well, I wasn't much behind him, Mawruss," Abe said. "When he smells it,
I smell it. He wets his finger, I wet my finger. Everything what that
sucker does to that fiddle, I did. He couldn't get nothing on me.
Mawruss. If he would offer to eat the fiddle, y'understand, I would got
just so good appetite as he got it, Mawruss, and don't you forget it. I
ain't going to let go so easy."

"Might you couldn't help yourself maybe," Morris commented.

"You shouldn't worry, Mawruss," Abe concluded. "I sold Felix Geigermann
since way before the Spanish War already, and I would sooner expect my
own brother--supposing I got one--to turn us down as him."

Despite Abe's optimism, however, the order for spring goods that Felix
Geigermann bestowed on them a month later fell short of their
expectations by over five hundred dollars.

"Business couldn't be so good with Felix this year, Mawruss," Abe
commented.

"Don't you jolly yourself, Abe," Morris replied. "It ain't so much that
business is bad with Felix as it is better with Klinger & Klein. Them
two cut-throats ain't paying Rabiner good money for only playing the
pianner. He's got to sell goods too."

"That's all right, Mawruss," Abe said. "Let him go ahead and _spiel_
pianner till he's blue in the face. Sooner or later Geigermann would
find out what stickers them Klinger & Klein garments is, and then Moe
Rabiner couldn't sell him no more of them goods, not if he would be a
whole orchestra already."

* * * * *

The personality of Aaron Shellak was simply thrown away on the garment
trade. His lean, scholarly face, surmounted by a shock of wavy brown
hair, would have assured his success as a virtuoso, and no one knew this
better than his brother, Professor Ladislaw Wcelak, under whose tuition
he had struggled through the intricacies of the first and second
positions.

"If you would only forget you ain't got a pair of shears in your right
hand, Aaron," the professor said, "and listen to what I am telling you,
in two years' time you are making more money than all the garment
cutters together. All you got to do