that wanted grease, and a coat too thin for the weather, came in
for a package of cigarettes. My mother climbed up on the counter, with
one foot on a shelf, to reach down the cigarettes. The customer gave
her the right change, and went out. And my mother never suspected that
that was the proposed hossen, who came to look her over and see if she
was likely to last. For my father considered himself a man of
experience now, this being his second match, and he was determined to
have a hand in this affair himself.

No sooner was the hossen out of the store than his mother, also
unknown to the innocent storekeeper, came in for a pound of tallow
candles. She offered a torn bill in payment, and my mother accepted it
and gave change; showing that she was wise enough in money matters to
know that a torn bill was good currency.

After the woman there shuffled in a poor man evidently from the
country, who, in a shy and yet challenging manner, asked for a package
of cheap tobacco. My mother produced the goods with her usual
dispatch, gave the correct change, and stood at attention for more
trade.

Parents and son held a council around the corner, the object of their
espionage never dreaming that she had been put to a triple test and
not found wanting. But in the evening of the same day she was
enlightened. She was summoned to her elder brother's house, for a
conference on the subject of the proposed match, and there she found
the young man who had bought the cigarettes. For my mother's family,
if they forced her to marry, were willing to make her path easier by
letting her meet the hossen, convinced that she must be won over by
his good looks and learned conversation.

It does not really matter how my mother felt, as she sat, with a
protecting niece in her lap, at one end of a long table, with the
hossen fidgeting at the other end. The marriage contract would be
written anyway, no matter what she thought of the hossen. And the
contract was duly written, in the presence of the assembled families
of both parties, after plenty of open discussion, in which everybody
except the prospective bride and groom had a voice.

One voice in particular broke repeatedly into the consultations of the
parents and the shadchan, and that was the voice of Henne Roesel, one
of my father's numerous poor cousins. Henne Roesel was not unknown to
my mother. She often came to the store, to beg, under pretence of
borrowing, a little flour or sugar or a s