Zelde, dumb with amazement, gazed at the mute, ugly monster before her. She recognized the wheels from the old baby-carriage; the legs were from her kitchen chair; the handle from the stove. And now she remembered the can, the brushes, and the mops that Rifke had probably discarded, and that Mendel had used in the creation of this freak. So this was the rival she had been jealous of, the usurper of her rights! “It makes in five minutes what I do a whole day,” Rifke rambled along. “They call it such a fancy name--Combination House-Cleaner. It cleans everything. The strangers is from a company which goes to make millions cans like this. “You’re gonna be rich, Mrs. Marantz! “Who would think from house-cleaning you could get rich! Here I’m cleaning houses for twenty-nine years and I never thought from such a scheme! You gotta have luck, I tell you!” “And I thought all the time it was Rifke! Oi, Mendel, you must think I’m such a fool!” “Forget it. If not for you I never would have did what I done. You made me to do it.” “I didn’t, Mendel.” She added in a caressing tone: “Your laziness did it, Mendel. You invented that machine because you were too lazy to work.” “What’s a wife? An X-Ray. She knows you through and through!” [12] Copyright, 1922, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1923, by David Freedman. BELSHAZZAR’S LETTER[13] By KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD (From _The Metropolitan_) “Belshazzar had a letter, He never had but one,” murmured Fenwick. I should never have suspected Fenwick of having read, much less having memorized, the works of Emily Dickinson. Fenwick does not read--much; and how should he have got hold of Emily, anyhow? It appeared presently--for of course he was questioned--that he had picked up her poems in the home of a New England foreign missionary, where he had once perforce been marooned during a cholera epidemic. Fenwick himself is, I fancy, outside all creeds; but he can’t help--given his life--running into missionaries, and he usually speaks well of them. He takes them, at all events, as all in the day’s work, as he reports, from very strange places, to the “interests” that employ him. They have an eye out, those “interests,” for a good many different commodities, though I incline to believe that rubber is the chief. Adventure has never seemed to pry Fenwick loose from his very American moorings, though he told me on a certain occasion, with a dropped jaw (in a kind of wry whisper) that he had lost his religion once--just like that--in a typhoon.