“I tell you, Sarah, I got a crazy woman for a wife!  It ain’t enough we celebrate eight birthdays a year with one-dollar presents each time and copper goods every day higher.  It ain’t enough that right to-morrow I got a fifty-dollar note over me from Sol Ginsberg—­a four-dollar present she wants for a child that don’t even know the name of a feedle!”

“Leon baby, stop hollering—­papa will go back and get the fiddle for you now before supper.  See—­mamma’s got money here in her waist—­”

“Papa will go back for the feedle not—­three dollars she’s saved for herself he can holler out of her for a feedle!”

“Abrahm, he’s screaming so he—­he’ll have a fit.”

“He should have two fits.”

“Darlink—­”

“I tell you the way you spoil your children it will some day come back on us.”

“It’s his birthday night, Abrahm—­five years since his little head first lay on the pillow next to me.”

“All right—­all right—­drive me crazy because he’s got a birthday.”

“Leon baby—­if you don’t stop hollering you’ll make yourself sick.  Abrahm, I never saw him like this—­he’s green—­”

“I’ll green him.  Where is that old feedle from Isadora—­that seventy-five-cents one?”

“I never thought of that!  You broke it that time you got mad at Isadore’s lessons.  I’ll run down.  Maybe it’s with the junk behind the store.  I never thought of that fiddle, Leon darlink—­wait—­mamma’ll run down and look—­wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle.”

The raucous screams stopped then suddenly, and on their very lustiest crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence.  On willing feet of haste, Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladderlike staircase that led to the brass shop.

Meanwhile, to a gnawing consciousness of dinner-hour, had assembled the house of Kantor.  Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium, delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley din of things.  Isadore, already astride his chair, well into center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of tiny fingers in lowering the wooden bib.

“Papa, Izzy’s eating first again.”

“Put down that loaf and wait until your mother dishes up or you’ll get a potch you won’t soon forget.”

“Say, pop—­”

“Don’t ‘say pop’ me!  I don’t want no street-bum freshness from you!”

“I mean, papa, there was an uptown swell in, and she bought one of them seventy-five-cent candlesticks for the first price,”

“Schlemmil—­Chammer!” said Mr. Kantor, rinsing his hands at the sink.  “Didn’t I always tell you it’s the first price times two when you see up-town business come in?  Haven’t I learned it to you often enough a slummer must pay for her nosiness?”