“Can you loan me your wash-boiler for the clothes?” she called. Mrs. Pelz threw up the sash. “The boiler? What’s the matter with yours again? Didn’t you tell me you had it fixed already last week?” “A black year on him, the robber, the way he fixed it! If you have no luck in this world, then it’s better not to live. There I spent out fifteen cents to stop up one hole, and it runs out another. How I ate out my gall bargaining with him he should let it down to fifteen cents! He wanted yet a quarter, the swindler. Gottuniu! My bitter heart on him for every penny he took from me for nothing!” “You got to watch all those swindlers, or they’ll steal the whites out of your eyes,” admonished Mrs. Pelz. “You should have tried out your boiler before you paid him. Wait a minute till I empty out my dirty clothes in a pillow-case; then I’ll hand it to you.” Mrs. Pelz returned with the boiler and tried to hand it across to Hanneh Breineh, but the soap-box refrigerator on the window-sill was in the way. “You got to come in for the boiler yourself,” said Mrs. Pelz. “Wait only till I tie my Sammy on to the high-chair he shouldn’t fall on me again. He’s so wild that ropes won’t hold him.” Hanneh Breineh tied the child in the chair, stuck a pacifier in his mouth, and went in to her neighbor. As she took the boiler Mrs. Pelz said: “Do you know Mrs. Melker ordered fifty pounds of chicken for her daughter’s wedding? And such grand chickens! Shining like gold! My heart melted in me just looking at the flowing fatness of those chickens.” Hanneh Breineh smacked her thin, dry lips, a hungry gleam in her sunken eyes. “Fifty pounds!” she gasped. “It ain’t possible. How do you know?” “I heard her with my own ears. I saw them with my own eyes. And she said she will chop up the chicken livers with onions and eggs for an appetizer, and then she will buy twenty-five pounds of fish, and cook it sweet and sour with raisins, and she said she will bake all her shtrudels on pure chicken fat.” “Some people work themselves up in the world,” sighed Hanneh Breineh. “For them is America flowing with milk and honey. In Savel Mrs. Melker used to get shriveled up from hunger. She and her children used to live on potato-peelings and crusts of dry bread picked out from the barrels; and in America she lives to eat chicken, and apple shtrudels soaking in fat.” “The world is a wheel always turning,” philosophized Mrs. Pelz. “Those who were high go down low, and those who’ve been low go up higher. Who will believe me here in America that in Poland I was a cook in a banker’s house? I handled ducks and geese every day. I used to bake coffee-cake with cream so thick you could cut it with a knife.”