door
neighbor, is--yes, she is smuggling something out of the window! If
she is caught--! Oh, I must help! Breine Malke beckons. She wants me
to do something. I see--I understand. I must stand in the doorway, to
obstruct the view of the officers, who are all engaged in the next
room just now. I move readily to my post, but I cannot resist my
curiosity. I must look over my shoulder a last time, to see what it is
Breine Malke wants to smuggle out.

I can scarcely stifle my laughter. Of all our earthly goods, our
neighbor has chosen for salvation a dented bandbox containing a
moth-eaten bonnet from my mother's happier days! And I laugh not only
from amusement but also from lightness of heart. For I have succeeded
in reducing our catastrophe to its simplest terms, and I find that it
is only a trifle, and no matter of life and death.

I could not help it. That was the way it looked to me.

I am sure I made as serious efforts as anybody to prepare myself for
life in America on the lines indicated in my father's letters. In
America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and
capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as _you_,
not, familiarly, as _thou_. The cobbler and the teacher had the same
title, "Mister." And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and
Gentiles, went to school! Education would be ours for the asking, and
economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared. He wanted
Fetchke and me to be taught some trade; so my sister was apprenticed
to a dressmaker and I to a milliner.

Fetchke, of course, was successful, and I, of course, was not. My
sister managed to learn her trade, although most of the time at the
dressmaker's she had to spend in sweeping, running errands, and
minding the babies; the usual occupations of the apprentice in any
trade.

But I--I had to be taken away from the milliner's after a couple of
months. I did try, honestly. With all my eyes I watched my mistress
build up a chimney pot of straw and things. I ripped up old bonnets
with enthusiasm. I picked up everybody's spools and thimbles, and
other far-rolling objects. I did just as I was told, for I was
determined to become a famous milliner, since America honored the
workman so. But most of the time I was sent away on errands--to the
market to buy soup greens, to the corner store to get change, and all
over town with bandboxes half as round again as I. It was winter, and
I was not very well dresse