Besides, his opportunities for acquiring facility and a repertoire in tongues had been more extensive than hers. While Miriam frequented the hallways of the tenement, or, at best, the sidewalk in front of it, concerned with the minding of the twins--Israel and Isadore, but both called, for convenience, Izzy--it was his practice to range far and wide, risking death beneath trolley cars, capture by the law, and murder at the hands of roused custodians of jobbing houses and buildings in course of construction, about which he lurked on the lookout for empty packing cases and bits of planking, and the like--such stuff as might be dragged home and there converted into household furnishings or stove fuel, depending upon whether at the moment the establishment stood more desperately in need of something to sit on than of something to burn. Even now, at the tender age of seven, going on eight, Solly betrayed the stirrings of a restless ambition such as his sire had never known. It was an open question whether he would grow up to be a gunman or a revered captain of finance. A tug of fate might set his eager footsteps toward either goal. Already he had a flowing command of the sort of English spoken by startled and indignant motormen, pestered policemen and watchmen, tempted by provocation entirely beyond their powers of self-control. So Solly served as chief interpreter while Miss Gwin informally tendered the presents that had been intrusted to her charge for transmission. In the same spirit Papa and Mamma Finkelstein, who continued to entertain the vaguest of theories regarding the sources of and the reasons for these benefactions, accepted them gratefully, with no desire to look a gift horse in the mouth. Gift horses were strange livestock in their experience, anyhow. The money--eight dollars and ninety-five cents, all told--went for fuel and food; but mainly for food. With the Finkelsteins, life was a feast or else it was a famine; in their scheme of domestic economics they sought no middle ground. As for the gown bestowed by Miss Trixie Adair, of the Gay Gamboliers, Mamma Finkelstein started wearing it right away, merely adapting it to existing conditions--conditions that were, with her, not only existent but, I may say, chronic. It was--or had been--a pale-blue evening gown of a satinlike material, with no neck and no sleeves to the upper part, but with a gracefully long train to the skirt part, and made to hook up the back.