a thick one and one is a thin one, and so one
goes about."

Shosshi expressed his sympathetic admiration and the courtship proceeded
apace. Sometimes Fanny and Pesach Weingott would be at home working, and
they were very affable to him. He began to lose something of his shyness
and his lurching gait, and he quite looked forward to his weekly visit
to the Belcovitches. It was the story of Cymon and Iphigenia over again.
Love improved even his powers of conversation, for when Belcovitch held
forth at length Shosshi came in several times with "So?" and sometimes
in the right place. Mr. Belcovitch loved his own voice and listened to
it, the arrested press-iron in his hand. Occasionally in the middle of
one of his harangues it would occur to him that some one was talking and
wasting time, and then he would say to the room, "Shah! Make an end,
make an end," and dry up. But to Shosshi he was especially polite,
rarely interrupting himself when his son-in-law elect was hanging on his
words. There was an intimate tender tone about these _causeries_.

"I should like to drop down dead suddenly," he would say with the air of
a philosopher, who had thought it all out. "I shouldn't care to lie up
in bed and mess about with medicine and doctors. To make a long job of
dying is so expensive."

"So?" said Shosshi.

"Don't worry, Bear! I dare say the devil will seize you suddenly,"
interposed Mrs. Belcovitch drily.

"It will not be the devil," said Mr. Belcovitch, confidently and in a
confidential manner. "If I had died as a young man, Shosshi, it might
have been different."

Shosshi pricked up his ears to listen to the tale of Bear's wild
cubhood.

"One morning," said Belcovitch, "in Poland, I got up at four o'clock to
go to Supplications for Forgiveness. The air was raw and there was no
sign of dawn! Suddenly I noticed a black pig trotting behind me. I
quickened my pace and the black pig did likewise. I broke into a run and
I heard the pig's paws patting furiously upon the hard frozen ground. A
cold sweat broke out all over me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the
pig's eyes burning like red-hot coals in the darkness. Then I knew that
the Not Good One was after me. 'Hear, O Israel,' I cried. I looked up to
the heavens but there was a cold mist covering the stars. Faster and
faster I flew and faster and faster flew the demon pig. At last the
_Shool_ came in sight. I made one last wild effort and fell exhausted
upon the holy thre