"It's time Philip should begin school!" said Reb Monash shatteringly one evening. Philip lay dozing on the horse-hair sofa. His heart shook before the joint assault of a great joy and a great fear. "School"--that unfathomable place of red brick and towering windows, where the "lads" went, the swaggering young men who jumped from pavement to pavement of Angel Street in five jumps; where one was brought into direct visual contact with "pleaseteacher," a thing beyond all imagination lovely and terrible. "So Channah, thou wilt not go to work to-morrow morning. He's an old man, Philip, and he must make his start in life." "All right, _tatte_!" Channah murmured. She thought ruefully of the fourpence or eightpence less it would mean in her week's total as a buttonhole hand. But she was devoted to Philip and his wise, elderly ways, and the thought of setting his feet upon the paths of that learning whence her own feet had been rudely torn on the morning of Philip's birth was worth the sacrifice of many fourpences. Philip's face shone soapily next morning. His black hair lay stretched in rigidly parallel formations on both sides of his impeccable parting. Channah had shined his button-boots with so much rubbing and spitting into congealed blacking that his boots seemed to focus all the light in the kitchen. His mother had adorned his blouse with a great bow of vermilion sateen. "Is pleaseteachers like policemans?" Philip asked, as Channah led him by a hand clammy with apprehension along the Doomington Road to the Bridgeway Elementary School. "Oh no! Pleaseteachers are much more lovely!" was the reply. "Policemen only lock little boys up, but pleaseteachers give 'em toffee--and flowers!" "And flowers?" echoed Philip incredulously. When they arrived at the entrance to the school, a sudden nausea overwhelmed Philip. "I'se not going to school!" he said suddenly and firmly. "Feivele, what do you mean?" "I'se not going!" "What's the matter with you? Why aren't you going?" "_Dat's_ why!" But Channah had not come unprepared for such an emergency. Mrs. Massel had anticipated it with a stick-jaw of Moishele's best. She held it towards the child and made provocative labial noises. "Aren't you going now?" "No!" he said a little more doubtfully. She had another weapon in the armoury. "_Tatte_ will give you such a _pitch-patch_!" she said threateningly--_pitch-patch_ being a form of castigation among all nations as constant in method as it is variable in name. In the surge of new fears, Reb Monash had been temporarily obscured. Philip's mind travelled back swiftly to the knees of Reb Monash where at so sinless an age he had already lain transversely more than once. He contemplated the possibility of _pitch-patch_ for some moments. "Gib me de stickjaw, den!" he said. "You can't eat it now!" "One suck!" he wheedled.