Lipman's was a task shop, and, according to the signification which the term has in the political economy of the sweating world, his operator, baster, and finisher, while nominally engaged at so much a week, were in reality paid by the piece, the economical week being determined by a stipulated quantity of made-up coats rather than by a fixed number of the earth's revolutions around its axis; for the sweat-shop day will not coincide with the solar day unless a given amount of work be accomplished in its course. As to the presser, he is invariably a piece-worker, pure and simple. For a more lucid account of the task system in the tailoring branch, I beg to refer the reader to David, although his exposition happens to be presented rather in the form of a satire on the subject. Indeed, David, while rather inclined to taciturnity, was an inveterate jester, and what few remarks he indulged in during his work would often cause boisterous merriment among his shop-mates, although he delivered them with a nonchalant manner and with the same look of good-humored irony, mingled in strange harmony with a general expression of gruffness, which his face usually wore. "My twelve dollars every week?" David echoed. "Oh, I see; you mean a week of twelve days!" And his needle resumed its duck-like sport in the cloth. "How do you make it out?" Meyer demanded, in order to elicit a joke from the witty young man by his side. "Of course, _you_ don't know how to make that out. But ask Heyman or Beile. The three of us do." "Tell him, then, and he will know too," Beile urged, laughing in advance at the expected fun. A request coming from the finisher was--yet unknown to herself--resistless with David, and in the present instance it loosened his tongue. "Well, I get twelve dollars a week, and Heyman fourteen. Now a working week has six days, but--hem--that 'but' gets stuck in my throat--but a day is neither a Sunday nor a Monday nor anything unless we make twelve coats. The calendars are a lot of liars." "What do you mean?" "They say a day has twenty-four hours. That's a bluff. A day has twelve coats." Beile's rapturous chuckle whetted his appetite for persiflage, and he went on:-- "They read the Tuesday Psalm in the synagogue this morning, but I should have read the Monday one." "Why?" "You see, Meyer's wife will soon come up with his dinner, and here I have still two coats to make of the twelve that I got yesterday. So it's still Monday with me. My Tuesday won't begin before about two o'clock this afternoon." "How much will you make this week?" Meyer questioned. "I don't expect to finish more than four days' work by the end of the week, and will only get eight dollars on Friday--that is, provided the Missis has not spent our wages by that time. So when it's Friday I'll call it Wednesday, see?"