"Oh--Mr. Meltzer--Max!"

"What you and poor old Dee Dee need is some of this spring air. Gee!

wouldn't I love to take you--and her down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats? Gee! would I? Just you and--and her."

"Max--oh, Max dearie!"

"HEADS"

By the great order of things which decreed that about the time Herod, brother to no man, died, Jesus, brother to all men, should be born; and that Rabelais, moral jester, should see light the very year that orthodox Louis XI passed on, by that same metaphysical scheme reduced to its lowliest, Essman's drop-picture machine, patent applied for, was completed the identical year that, for Rudolph Pelz, the rainy-day skirt slumped from a novelty to a commodity.

At a very low tide in the affairs of the Novelty Rainy Day Skirt Company, Canal Street, that year of our Lord, 1898, when letter-head stationery was about to be rewritten and the I-haven't-seen-you-since-last-century jocosity was about to be born, Rudolph Pelz closed his workaday by ushering out Mr. Emil Hahn, locking his front door after his full force of two women machine-stitchers, and opening a rear door upon his young manhood's estate. A modest-enough holding in the eyes of you or me as beholders; but for the past week not an evening upon opening that door but what tears rushed to his throat, which he laughed through, for shame of them.

On a bed, obviously dragged from its shadowy corner to a place beside the single window, and propped up so that her hair, so slickly banding her head in two plaits, sprang out against the coarsely white pillows, Mrs. Rosa Sopinsky Pelz, on an evening when the air rose sultry, stale, and even garbage-laden from a cat-and-can-infested courtyard, flashed her quick smile toward that opening door, her week-old infant suckling at her breast.

"You ought to seen, Roody; she laughed! Puckered herself up into the cutest little grin when mamma left just now."

Mr. Pelz wound his way through an overcrowded huddle of furniture that was gloomily, uglily utilitarian. A sideboard spread in pressed glass; a chest of drawers piled high with rough-dry family wash; a coal-range, and the smell and sound of simmering. A garland of garlic, caught up like smilax, and another of drying red peppers. On a shelf above the sink, cluttered there with all the pitiful unprivacy of poverty, a layout, to recite which will label me with the nigritude of the realist, but which is actually the nigritude of reality--a dish of brown-and-white blobs of soap; a coffee-cup with a great jag in its lip; a bottle of dried beans; a rubber nipple floating in a saucer of water; a glass tumbler containing one inverted tooth-brush; a medicine-bottle glued down in a dark-brown pool of its own substance; a propped-up bit of mirror, jagged of edge; a piece of comb; a rhinestone breastpin; a bunion-plaster; a fork; spoon; a sprouting onion. Yet all of this somehow lit by a fall of very coarse, very white, and very freshly starched lace curtains portiere-fashion from the door, looped back in great curves from the single window, and even skirting stiffly and cleanly the bureau-front and bed-edge.

"How is my little mammela?" said Mr. Pelz, leaning over the bed to kiss Mrs. Pelz on the shining plaits, the light-tan column of throat and the little fist pressed so deeply into her bosom.

"Just ought to seen, Roody--honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off mamma's _sheidel!_" [Footnote: Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage.]

"Red head!" he said, stroking down at the warm "bulge of blanket, so snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm.

"It's redder than yours already, Roody."

"She's sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain't it so, mammela?"

She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.

"There's some herring on the table mamma brought over, and some raw meat and onions. That's some _borshtsh_ on the stove Etta carried all the way over from Hester Street for your supper."

"And what for the little mammela?"

"I'm fed up, Roody. Mamma closed the store at five to run over with some of that milk-shake like Doctor Aarons said. He sent his little son Isadore over with the prescription. Like I said to mamma, she should let the Canal Street Kosher Sausage Company do double the business from five until six while she closes shop to carry her daughter a milk-shake! Like I was used to it from home!"

"When my girl gets to be a little mammela, the best shouldn't be none too good."

She continued to stroke up at his sleeve and occasionally on up into his uneven shock of red hair.

"You miss me in the shop, Roody?"

"You should just see once how that Ruby Grabenheiner sits at your machine! She does one-half your work not one-half so good."

"I'll be back next week Monday."

He patted her quickly. "No! No! A mammela's place is with her baby."

"Roody, you make me laugh. I should sit at home now since we got a new mouth to feed? That would be a fine come-off!"

"Who do you think was just in, Rosie? Emil Hahn."

"Sol is going to make for me, Roody, one of those little packing-case cribs like he built for Etta up in the pants-factory, so when the machine works it rocks, too. Did--did the check from Solomon & Glauber come in on the last mail, Roody?"

"Now, Rosie, you mustn't worry yourself about such--"

"What you looking so funny for, Roody?"

"I was starting to tell you, Rosie--Hahn was just in and--"

"Roody, don't change the subject on me always. You looked funny. Is it something wrong with Solomon & Glau--"

"If you don't take the cake, Rosie! Now, why should I look funny?

'Funny,' she says I look, I'm hungry. I smell Etta's _borshtsh_."

She half raised herself, the pulling lips of the child drawing up the little head from the cove of arm.

"Rosie, you mustn't lift up that way!"

"Roody, I can read you like a book! Solomon & Glauber have countermanded, too."

"Now, Rosie, wouldn't that keep until--"

"They have!"

"Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they're shipping back the consignment."

"Roody!"

"What you going to do about it? Give you my word never seen the like.

It's like the rainy-day skirt had died overnight. All of a sudden from a novelty, I find myself with such a commodity that every manufacturer in the business is making them up for himself."

"You seen it first, though, Roody. Nobody can take it away from you that you seen first how the rainy-day skirt and its shortness would be such a success with the women."

"'Seen it first,' she says! Say, what good does it do me if I didn't see far enough? I pick for myself such a success that I crowd myself out of business."

"It's a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be allowed to--"

"Say, if it wouldn't be Solomon & Glauber, it would be Funk & Hausman or any other firm. The rainy-day skirt has slipped out of my hands, Rosie, to the big fellows. We must realize that for ourselves. That's the trouble when you don't deal in a patented product. What's the little fellows like myself to do against a firm like Solomon & Glauber? Start something?"

"Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!"

"Say, it don't tickle my ribs no more than yours."

"Roody, maybe it's the worst thing ever happened to us you wouldn't listen to mamma and be satisfied with being chief cutter at Lipschuts'."