The groom's mother ran calling aloud for help to her husband, who, together with a dozen uncles and brothers-in-law, was still sleeping soundly after the evening's festivity. She then sought out the bridegroom, an eighteen-year-old boy with his mother's milk still on his lips, who, in a silk caftan and a fur cap, was moving about the room in bewildered fashion, his eyes on the ground, ashamed to look anyone in the face. In the end she fell back on the mother of the bride, and these two went in to her together, having forced open the door between them. "Why did you lock yourself in, dear daughter. There is no need to be ashamed." "Marriage is a Jewish institution!" said the groom's mother, and kissed her future daughter-in-law on both cheeks. The girl made no reply. "Your mother-in-law has brought you a wig and a hood for the procession to the Shool," said her own mother. The band had already struck up the "Good Morning" in the next room. "Come now, Kallehshi, Kalleh-leben, the guests are beginning to assemble." The groom's mother took hold of the plaits in order to loosen them. The bride bent her head away from her, and fell on her own mother's neck. "I can't, Mame-leben! My heart won't let me, Mame-kron!" She held her hair with both hands, to protect it from the other's scissors. "For God's sake, my daughter? my life," begged the mother. "In the other world you will be plunged for this into rivers of fire. The apostate who wears her own hair after marriage will have her locks torn out with red hot pincers," said the other with the scissors. A cold shiver went through the girl at these words. "Mother-life, mother-crown!" she pleaded. Her hands sought her hair, and the black silky tresses fell through them in waves. Her hair, the hair which had grown with her growth, and lived with her life, was to be cut off, and she was never, never to have it again--she was to wear strange hair, hair that had grown on another person's head, and no one knows whether that other person was alive or lying in the earth this long time, and whether she might not come any night to one's bedside, and whine in a dead voice: "Give me back my hair, give me back my hair!" A frost seized the girl to the marrow, she shivered and shook. Then she heard the squeak of scissors over her head, tore herself out of her mother's arms, made one snatch at the scissors, flung them across the room, and said in a scarcely human voice: "My own hair! May God Himself punish me!" That day the bridegroom's mother took herself off home again, together with the sweet-cakes and the geese which she had brought for the wedding breakfast for her own guests. She wanted to take the bridegroom as well, but the bride's mother said: "I will not give him back to you! He belongs to me already!" The following Sabbath they led the bride in procession to the Shool wearing her own hair in the face of all the town, covered only by a large hood.