"I feel it! I know he's got talent! I know my children so well. A--a father don't understand. I'm so next to them. It's like I can tell always everything that will happen to them--it's like a pain--somewheres here--like in back of my heart." "A pain in the heart she gets." "For my own children I'm always a prophet, I tell you! You think I didn't know that--that terrible night after the pogrom after we got out of Kief to across the border! You remember, Abrahm, how I predicted it to you then--how our Mannie would be born too soon and--and not right from my suffering! Did it happen on the ship to America just the way I said it would? Did it happen just exactly how I predicted our Izzie would break his leg that time playing on the fire-escape? I tell you, Abrahm, I get a real pain here under my heart that tells me what comes to my children. Didn't I tell you how Esther would be the first in her confirmation-class and our baby Boris would be redheaded? At only five years, our Leon all by himself cries for a fiddle--get it for him, Abrahm--get it for him!" "I tell you, Sarah, I got a crazy woman for a wife! It ain't enough we celebrate eight birthdays a year with one-dollar presents each time and copper goods every day higher. It ain't enough that right to-morrow I got a fifty-dollar note over me from Sol Ginsberg; a four-dollar present she wants for a child that don't even know the name of a feedle." "Leon, baby, stop hollering. Papa will go back and get the fiddle for you now before supper. See, mamma's got money here in her waist--" "Papa will go back for the feedle _not_--three dollars she's saved for herself he can holler out of her for a feedle!" "Abrahm, he's screaming so he--he'll have a fit." "He should have two fits." "Darlink--" "I tell you the way you spoil your children it will some day come back on us." "It's his birthday night, Abrahm--five years since his little head first lay on the pillow next to me." "All right--all right--drive me crazy because he's got a birthday." "Leon baby--if you don't stop hollering you'll make yourself sick. Abrahm, I never saw him like this--he's green--" "I'll green him. Where is that old feedle from Isadore--that seventy-five-cents one?" "I never thought of that! You broke it that time you got mad at Isadore's lessons. I'll run down. Maybe it's with the junk behind the store. I never thought of that fiddle. Leon darlink--wait! Mamma'll run down and look. Wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle." The raucous screams stopped then, suddenly, and on their very lustiest crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence. On willing feet of haste Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladder-like staircase that led to the brass-shop.