a volume of Shaaloth-u-Tshuvoth, or “Questions and Answers” to the colossal casuistic literature of his race.  His aid was also invoked as a Shadchan, though he forgot to take his commissions and lacked the restless zeal for the mating of mankind which animated Sugarman, the professional match-maker.  In fine, he was a witty old fellow and everybody loved him.  He and his wife spoke English with a strong foreign accent; in their more intimate causeries they dropped into Yiddish.

The Rebbitzin poured out the Rabbi’s coffee and whitened it with milk drawn direct from the cow into her own jug.  The butter and cheese were equally kosher, coming straight from Hebrew Hollanders and having passed through none but Jewish vessels.  As the Reb sat himself down at the head of the table Hannah entered the room.

“Good morning, father,” she said, kissing him.  “What have you got your new coat on for?  Any weddings to-day?”

“No, my dear,” said Reb Shemuel, “marriages are falling off.  There hasn’t even been an engagement since Belcovitch’s eldest daughter betrothed herself to Pesach Weingott.”

“Oh, these Jewish young men!” said the Rebbitzin.  “Look at my Hannah—­as pretty a girl as you could meet in the whole Lane—­and yet here she is wasting her youth.”

Hannah bit her lip, instead of her bread and butter, for she felt she had brought the talk on herself.  She had heard the same grumblings from her mother for two years.  Mrs. Jacobs’s maternal anxiety had begun when her daughter was seventeen.  “When I was seventeen,” she went on, “I was a married woman.  Now-a-days the girls don’t begin to get a Chosan till they’re twenty.”

“We are not living in Poland,” the Reb reminded her.

“What’s that to do with it?  It’s the Jewish young men who want to marry gold.”

“Why blame them?  A Jewish young man can marry several pieces of gold, but since Rabbenu Gershom he can only marry one woman,” said the Reb, laughing feebly and forcing his humor for his daughter’s sake.

“One woman is more than thou canst support,” said the Rebbitzin, irritated into Yiddish, “giving away the flesh from off thy children’s bones.  If thou hadst been a proper father thou wouldst have saved thy money for Hannah’s dowry, instead of wasting it on a parcel of vagabond Schnorrers.  Even so I can give her a good stock of bedding and under-linen.  It’s a reproach and a shame that thou hast not yet found her a husband.  Thou canst find husbands quick enough for other men’s daughters!”

“I found a husband for thy father’s daughter,” said the Reb, with a roguish gleam in his brown eyes.

“Don’t throw that up to me!  I could have got plenty better.  And my daughter wouldn’t have known the shame of finding nobody to marry her.  In Poland at least the youths would have flocked to marry her because she was a Rabbi’s daughter, and they’d think It an honor to be a son-in-law of a Son of the Law.  But in this godless country!  Why in my village the Chief Rabbi’s daughter, who was so ugly as to make one spit out, carried off the finest man in the district.”