pleasurable sensations that he recognized, at the next table, Isaac Meiselson, the unconscious cause of all his prosperity. 

 "Excuse me," he began, "ain't your name Meiselson?" 

 "My name is Mr. Meiselson," Isaac admitted. "This is Mr. Zamp, ain't it?" 

 Zamp nodded. 

 "You look pretty well, considering the way you are working in that clothing business of yours," Meiselson remarked. 

 "Hard work never hurted me none," Zamp answered. "Are you still in the soap and perfumery business, Mr. Meiselson?" 

 Meiselson shook his head. 

 "No," he said, "I went out of the soap business when I got married last month." 

 "Is that so?" Zamp commented. "And did you go into another business?" 

 "Not yet," Meiselson replied, and then he smiled. "The fact is," he added in a burst of confidence, "my wife is a dressmaker." 

 

 CHAPTER THREE 

 THE SORROWS OF SEIDEN 

 "Say, lookyhere!" said Isaac Seiden, proprietor of the Sanspareil Waist Company, as he stood in the office of his factory on Greene Street; "what is the use your telling me it is when it ain't? My wife's mother never got a brother by the name Pesach." 

ay

 He was addressing Mrs. Miriam Saphir, who sat on the edge of the chair nursing her cheek with her left hand. Simultaneously she rocked to and fro and beat her forehead with her clenched fist, while at intervals she made inarticulate sounds through her nose significant of intense suffering. 

 "I should drop dead in this chair if she didn't," she contended. "Why should I lie to you, Mr. Seiden? My own daughter, which I called her Bessie for this here Pesach Gubin, should never got a husband and my other children also, which one of 'em goes around on crutches right now, Mr. Seiden, on account she gets knocked down by a truck." 

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