Ha! ha! What do you say to that? She does not want charity. A nice story, as I am a Jewish child! Well, what's to be done next? Any one else in my place would surely have torn up the two letters and put the money in his pocket. But I am not that sort. I did a better thing than that. You will hear what. I argued with myself after this fashion: When all is said and done, I got paid by my brother Mottel for the journey. Then what do I want him for now? I went and gave the two letters to my father. I wanted to hear what he would say to them. He would understand the translation better than the teacher, though he is a father, and the teacher is a teacher. * * * What happened? After my father had read the two letters and the translation, he took hold of my brother Mottel and demanded an explanation of him. Do not ask me any more. You want to know the end--what happened to Esther, the teacher's daughter, and to my brother Mottel? What could have happened? Esther got married to a widower. Oh, how she cried. I was at the wedding. Why she cried so much I do not know. It seemed that her heart told her she would not live long with her husband. And so it was. She lived with him only one-half year, and died. I do not know what she died of. I do not know. No one knows. Her father and mother do not know either. It was said she took poison--just went and poisoned herself. "But it's a lie. Enemies have invented that lie," said her mother, the teacher's wife. I heard her myself. And my brother Mottel? Oh, he married before Esther was even betrothed. He went to live with his father-in-law. But he soon returned, and alone. What had happened? He wanted to divorce his wife. Said my father to him: "You are a man of clay." My mother would not have this. They quarrelled. It was lively. But it was useless. He divorced his wife and married another woman. He now has two children--a boy and a girl. The boy is called Herzl, after Dr. Herzl, and the girl is called Esther. My father wanted her to be named Gittel, and my mother was dying for her to be called Leah, after her mother. There arose a quarrel between my father and mother. They quarrelled a whole day and a whole night. They decided the child should be named Leah-Gittel, after their two mothers. Afterwards my father decided he would not have Leah-Gittel. "What is the sense of it? Why should her mother's name go first?" My brother Mottel came in from the synagogue and said he had named the child Esther. Said my father to him: "Man of clay, where did you get the name Esther from?" Mottel replied: "Have you forgotten it will soon be '_Purim_'?" Well, what have you to say now? It's all over. My father never calls Mottel "man of clay" since then. But both of them--my mother and my father--exchanged glances and were silent. What the silence and the exchange of glances meant I do not know. Perhaps you can tell me? The Pocket-Knife