reminded of the existence of their dear one, and would not go out of its way to castigate them.  The ruse succeeded, and Alte was anxiously waiting to change both her names under the Chuppah, and to gratify her life-long curiosity on the subject.  Meantime, her mother had been calling her “Alte,” or “old ’un,” which sounded endearing to the child, but grated on the woman arriving ever nearer to the years of discretion.  Occasionally, Mrs. Belcovitch succumbed to the prevailing tendency, and called her “Fanny,” just as she sometimes thought of herself as Mrs. Belcovitch, though her name was Kosminski.  When Alte first went to school in London, the Head Mistress said, “What’s your name?” The little “old ’un” had not sufficient English to understand the question, but she remembered that the Head Mistress had made the same sounds to the preceding applicant, and, where some little girls would have put their pinafores to their eyes and cried, Fanny showed herself full of resource.  As the last little girl, though patently awe-struck, had come off with flying colors, merely by whimpering “Fanny Belcovitch,” Alte imitated these sounds as well as she was able.

“Fanny Belcovitch, did you say?” said the Head Mistress, pausing with arrested pen.

Alte nodded her flaxen poll vigorously.

“Fanny Belcovitch,” she repeated, getting the syllables better on a second hearing.

The Head Mistress turned to an assistant.

“Isn’t it astonishing how names repeat themselves?  Two girls, one after the other, both with exactly the same name.”

They were used to coincidences in the school, where, by reason of the tribal relationship of the pupils, there was a great run on some half-a-dozen names.  Mr. Kosminski took several years to understand that Alte had disowned him.  When it dawned upon him he was not angry, and acquiesced in his fate.  It was the only domestic detail in which he had allowed himself to be led by his children.  Like his wife, Chayah, he was gradually persuaded into the belief that he was a born Belcovitch, or at least that Belcovitch was Kosminski translated into English.

Blissfully unconscious of the Dutch taint in Pesach Weingott, Bear Belcovitch bustled about in reckless hospitality.  He felt that engagements were not every-day events, and that even if his whole half-sovereign’s worth of festive provision was swallowed up, he would not mind much.  He wore a high hat, a well-preserved black coat, with a cutaway waistcoat, showing a quantity of glazed shirtfront and a massive watch chain.  They were his Sabbath clothes, and, like the Sabbath they honored, were of immemorial antiquity.  The shirt served him for seven Sabbaths, or a week of Sabbaths, being carefully folded after each.  His boots had the Sabbath polish.  The hat was the one he bought when he first set up as a Baal Habaas or respectable pillar of the synagogue; for even in the smallest Chevra the high hat comes next