in such a way that I began to think she
meant murder.

"You don't know?" she exclaimed with a sinister flash in her eyes. "What
do you mean by that? Don't you two leave the shop together? How can you
help seeing what becomes of him?"

Then I remembered that when Manasseh and I left the shop, he walked with
me a few blocks, and then went off in another direction, and that one
day, when I asked him where he was going, he had replied, "To some
friends."

"He must go to some friends," I said to the woman.

"To some friends?" she repeated, and burst into strange laughter. "Who?
Whose? Ours? We're greeners, we are, we have no friends. What friends
should he have, poor, miserable wretch?"

"I don't know," I said, "but that is what he told me."

"All right!" said Manasseh's wife. "I'll teach him a lesson he won't
forget in a hurry."

With these words she departed.

When she had left the room, I pictured to myself poor consumptive
Manasseh being taught a "lesson" by his yellow-haired wife, and I pitied
him.

Manasseh was a man of about thirty. His yellowish-white face was set in
a black beard; he was very thin, always ailing and coughing, had never
learnt to write, and he read only Yiddish--a quiet, respectable man, I
might almost say the only hand in the shop who never grudged a
fellow-worker his livelihood. He had been only a year in the country,
and the others made sport of him, but I always stood up for him, because
I liked him very much.

Wherever does he go, now? I wondered to myself, and I resolved to find
out.

Next morning I met Manasseh as usual, and at first I intended to tell
him of his wife's visit to me the day before; but the poor operative
looked so low-spirited, so thoroughly unhappy, that I felt sure his wife
had already given him the promised "lesson," and I hadn't the courage to
mention her to him just then.

In the evening, as we were going home from the workshop, Manasseh said
to me:

"Did my wife come to see you yesterday?"

"Yes, Brother Manasseh," I answered. "She seemed something annoyed with
you."

"She has a dreadful temper," observed the workman. "When she is really
angry, she's fit to kill a man. But it's her bitter heart, poor
thing--she's had so many troubles! We're so poor, and she's far away
from her family."

Manasseh gave a deep sigh.

"She asked you where I go other days after work?" he continued.

"Yes."

"Would you like to know?"

"Why not, Mister Gricklin!"