y
the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at
least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But
perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she
had money. He put the question to his mother.

'Certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'She has
thousands of _Gulden_ in her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have
had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one
foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her
eye upon this pauper.'

'But I thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist.

'His inn--yes. His sense--no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying
too much attention to the Talmud instead of his business. He was
always a _Schlemihl_.'

'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange
saying for a Rabbi's daughter.'

'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the
Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so
now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money.
If he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the
Talmud prescribes?'

'He seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'Do
you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand
marriages before he was eighteen?'

'Make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily.

The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one
in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the
charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another
marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the _Shadchan_,
and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this
God-forsaken village, might have made a few _Gulden_ out of it.

Beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing,
Schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general
disapprobation of the marriage. Really, when one came to think of it,
it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon
him. And such a grandfather! Perhaps the _Bube_ was, indeed, losing
her reason. Or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking
seriously this parochial scandal, and believing that because a
doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise
from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? Yet, on more
than one occasion, he came upon circumstanc