tle head
first lay on the pillow next to me."

"All right--all right--drive me crazy because he's got a birthday."

"Leon baby--if you don't stop hollering you'll make yourself sick.
Abrahm, I never saw him like this--he's green--"

"I'll green him. Where is that old feedle from Isadora--that
seventy-five-cents one?"

"I never thought of that! You broke it that time you got mad at
Isadore's lessons. I'll run down. Maybe it's with the junk behind the
store. I never thought of that fiddle, Leon darlink--wait--mamma'll run
down and look--wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle."

The raucous screams stopped then suddenly, and on their very lustiest
crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence. On willing feet of haste,
Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladderlike staircase that led
to the brass shop.

Meanwhile, to a gnawing consciousness of dinner-hour, had assembled the
house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement
which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium,
delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley
din of things. Isadore, already astride his chair, well into
center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther
Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of
tiny fingers in lowering the wooden bib.

"Papa, Izzy's eating first again."

"Put down that loaf and wait until your mother dishes up or you'll get a
potch you won't soon forget."

"Say, pop--"

"Don't 'say pop' me! I don't want no street-bum freshness from you!"

"I mean, papa, there was an uptown swell in, and she bought one of them
seventy-five-cent candlesticks for the first price,"

"_Schlemmil--Chammer!_" said Mr. Kantor, rinsing his hands at the sink.
"Didn't I always tell you it's the first price times two when you see
up-town business come in? Haven't I learned it to you often enough a
slummer must pay for her nosiness?"

There entered then, on poor shuffling feet, Mannie Kantor so marred in
the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul
had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down
upon his face, and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of
system, his vacuity of face was not that of childhood but rather as if
his light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so
terribly and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells
closed