"Have you a house?" "Have I a house!" "Worth how much?" "If it were in Samoscz, it would be worth something. Here it's not worth a dreier, except that I have a place to lay my head down in." "Would you sell it for one hundred rubles?" "Preserve us! One's own inheritance! Not for three hundred." "Would you give it for five hundred?" "_Mê!_ I should hire a lodging and apply myself to some business!" "And what is your business now?" "What business?" "What do you live on?" "_That's_ what you mean! One just lives." "On what?" "God's providence. When He gives something, one has it!" "But He doesn't throw things down from heaven?" "He does so! Can I tell how I live? Let us reckon: I need a lot of money, at least four rubles a week. The house yields, beside my own lodging, twelve rubles a year--nine go in taxes, five in repairs, leaves a hole in the pocket of two rubles a year! That's it." He puts on airs: "Heaven be praised, I have no money. Neither I, nor any one of the Jews standing here, nor any other Jews--except perhaps the 'German' ones[90] in the big towns. We have no money. I don't know any trade, my grandfather never sewed a shoe. Therefore I live as God wills, and have lived so for fifty years. And if there is a child to be married, we have a wedding, and dance in the mud." "Once and for all, what are you?" "A Jew." "What do you do all day?" "I study, I pray--what else should a Jew do? And when I have eaten, I go to the market." "What do you do in the market?" "What do I do? Whatever turns up. Well, yesterday, for example, I heard, as I passed, that Yoneh Borik wanted to buy three rams for a gentleman. Before daylight I was at the house of a second gentleman, who had once said, he had too many rams. I made an agreement with Yoneh Borik, and, heaven be praised, we made a ruble and a half by it." "Are you, then, what is called a commission-agent?" "How should I know? Sometimes it even occurs to me to buy a bit of produce." "Sometimes?" "What do you mean by 'sometimes'? When I have a ruble, I buy." "And when not?" "I get one." "How?" "What do you mean by 'how'?" And it is an hour before I find out that Levi Yitzchock Bärenpelz is a bit of a rabbinical assistant, and acts as arbiter in quarrels; a bit of a commission-agent, a fragment of a merchant, a morsel of a match-maker, and now and again, when the fancy takes him, a messenger. Thanks to all these "trades," the counted and the forgotten ones, he earns his bread, although with toil and trouble, for wife and child--even for the married daughter, because her father-in-law is _but_ a pauper. THE SECOND ATTEMPT I am taken into a shop. A few packets of matches, a few boxes of cigarettes; needles, pins, hair-pins, buttons, green and yellow soap, a few pieces of home-made, fragrant soap, a few grocery wares. "Who lives here?" I ask.