family hotel in Seventy-second Street. Such people with big stores in
Sixth Avenue can buy and sell us. Not even if I could afford it would I
want to give up my house and my porch, where I can smoke my pipe, and my
comforts that I worked for all my life, and move to the city in rooms so
little and so far up I can't afford to pay for 'em. I should give up my
chickens and my comforts!"

"Your comforts, always your comforts! Do I think of _my_ comforts?"

"Ma, don't you and pa begin now with your fussing. Like cats you are one
minute and the next like doves."

"Don't boss me in my own house, Izzy! So afraid your papa is that he
won't get all the comforts what's coming to him. I wish you was so good
to me as you are to that cat, Julius--twice I asked you not to feed him
on the carpet. Scat, Billy!"

"Pass me some noodles, maw."

"Good ones, eh, Izzy?"

"Fine, maw."

"I ask you, is it more comfortable, Julius, for me to be cooped up in
the city in rooms that all together ain't as big as my kitchen? No, but
of my children I think too besides my own comforts."

"Ya, ya; now, Becky, don't get excited. Look at your mamma, Pearlie;
shame on her, eh? How mad she gets at me till blue like her wrapper her
face gets."

"My house and my yard so smooth like your hand, and my big porch and my
new laundry with patent wringer is more to me as a hotel in the city.
But when I got a young lady daughter with no attentions and no prospects
I can't think always of my own comforts."

"Ya, ya, Becky; don't get excited."

"Don't ya--ya me, neither."

"_Ach_, old lady, that only means how much I love you."

"We got a young lady daughter; do you want that she should sit and sit
and sit till for ever we got a daughter, only she ain't young no more. I
tell you out here ain't no place for a young goil--what has she got?"

"Yes, papa; what have I got? The trees for company!"

"Do you see, Julius, in the new bungalows any families moving in with
young ladies? Would even your son Isadore what ain't a young lady stay
out here when he was old enough to get hisself a job in the city?"

"That a boy should leave his old father like that!"

"Wasn't you always kickin' to me, pa, that there wasn't a future in the
business after the transaction came--wasn't you?"

"No more arguments you get with me!"

"What chance, Julius, I ask you, has a goil like Poil got out here in
Newton? To sit on the front porch nights with Meena Schlossman don't get