I right or wrong, Mr. Seiden?"

Mr. Seiden made no reply. He was blinking at vacancy while his mind
reverted to an afternoon call paid uptown by Mrs. Miriam Saphir. As a
corollary, Mrs. Seiden had kept him awake half the night, and the
burden of her jeremiad was: "What did you ever done for my relations?
Tell me that."

"Say, lookyhere, Sternsilver," he said at length, "what are you trying
to drive into?"

"I am driving into this, Mr. Seiden," Philip replied: "Miss Bessie
Saphir must got to get married some time. Ain't it?"

Seiden nodded.

"_Schon gut!_" Sternsilver continued. "There's no time like the
present."

A forced smile started to appear on Seiden's face, when the door
leading to the public hall opened and a bonneted and shawled figure
appeared. It was none other than Mrs. Miriam Saphir.

"_Ai, tzuris!_" she cried; and sinking into the nearest chair she began
forthwith to rock to and fro and to beat her forehead with her clenched
fist.

"_Nu!_" Seiden exploded. "What's the trouble now?"

Mrs. Saphir ceased rocking. On leaving home she had provided herself
with a pathetic story which would not only excuse her presence in
Seiden's factory but was also calculated to wring at least seventy-five
cents from Seiden himself. Unfortunately she had forgotten to go over
the minor details of the narrative on her way downtown, and now even
the main points escaped her by reason of a heated altercation with the
conductor of a Third Avenue car. The matter in dispute was her tender,
in lieu of fare, of a Brooklyn transfer ticket which she had found
between the pages of a week-old newspaper. For the first ten blocks of
her ride she had feigned ignorance of the English language, and five
blocks more were consumed in the interpretation, by a well-meaning
passenger, of the conductor's urgent demands. Another five blocks
passed in Mrs. Saphir's protestations that she had received the
transfer in question from the conductor of a Twenty-third Street car;
failing the accuracy of which statement, she expressed the hope that
her children should all drop dead and that she herself might never stir
from her seat. This brought the car to Bleecker Street, where the
conductor rang the bell and invited Mrs. Saphir to alight. Her first
impulse was to defy him to the point of a constructive assault, with
its attendant lawsuit against the railroad company; but she discovered
that, in carrying out her project to its successful issue, sh