"I am Manasseh's wife," said she. "Manasseh Gricklin's?" I asked. "Yes," said my visitor, "Gricklin's, Gricklin's." I hastily slipped on a coat, and begged her to be seated. Manasseh was an old friend of mine, he was a capmaker, and we worked together in one shop. And I knew that he lived somewhere in the same tenement as myself, but it was the first time I had the honor of seeing his wife. "Look here," began the woman, "don't you work in the same shop as my husband?" "Yes, yes," I said. "Well, and now tell me," and the yellow-haired woman gave a bound like a hyena, "how is it I see you come home from work with all other respectable people, and my husband not? And it isn't the first time, either, that he's gone, goodness knows where, and come home two hours after everyone else. Where's he loitering about?" "I don't know," I replied gravely. The woman brandished her ladle in such a way that I began to think she meant murder. "You don't know?" she exclaimed with a sinister flash in her eyes. "What do you mean by that? Don't you two leave the shop together? How can you help seeing what becomes of him?" Then I remembered that when Manasseh and I left the shop, he walked with me a few blocks, and then went off in another direction, and that one day, when I asked him where he was going, he had replied, "To some friends." "He must go to some friends," I said to the woman. "To some friends?" she repeated, and burst into strange laughter. "Who? Whose? Ours? We're greeners, we are, we have no friends. What friends should he have, poor, miserable wretch?" "I don't know," I said, "but that is what he told me." "All right!" said Manasseh's wife. "I'll teach him a lesson he won't forget in a hurry." With these words she departed. When she had left the room, I pictured to myself poor consumptive Manasseh being taught a "lesson" by his yellow-haired wife, and I pitied him. Manasseh was a man of about thirty. His yellowish-white face was set in a black beard; he was very thin, always ailing and coughing, had never learnt to write, and he read only Yiddish--a quiet, respectable man, I might almost say the only hand in the shop who never grudged a fellow-worker his livelihood. He had been only a year in the country, and the others made sport of him, but I always stood up for him, because I liked him very much. Wherever does he go, now? I wondered to myself, and I resolved to find out. Next morning I met Manasseh as usual, and at first I intended to tell him of his wife's visit to me the day before; but the poor operative looked so low-spirited, so thoroughly unhappy, that I felt sure his wife had already given him the promised "lesson," and I hadn't the courage to mention her to him just then. In the evening, as we were going home from the workshop, Manasseh said to me: "Did my wife come to see you yesterday?" "Yes, Brother Manasseh," I answered. "She seemed something annoyed with you."