In the forepart of the oven, on either hand, stood a variety of pots and pipkins, and gossipped together in their several tones. An elder child stood beside them holding a wooden spoon, with which she stirred or skimmed as the case required. Seinwill's wife, very much occupied, stood by the one four-post bed, which was spread with a clean white sheet, and on which she had laid out various kinds of cakes, of unbaked dough, in honor of Sabbath. Beside her stood a child, its little face red with crying, and hindered her in her work. "Seinwill, take Chatzkele away! How can I get on with the cakes? Don't you know it's Friday?" she kept calling out, and Seinwill, sitting at his work beside a large table covered with books, repeated every time like an echo: "Chatzkele, let mother alone!" And Chatzkele, for all the notice he took, might have been as deaf as the bedpost. The minute Seinwill saw me, he ran to meet me in a shamefaced way, like a sinner caught in the act; and before I was able to say a word, that is, tell him angrily and with decision that he must give me my book finished or not--never mind about the twenty kopeks, and so on--and thus revenge myself on him, he began to answer, and he showed me that my book was done, it was already in the press, and there only remained the lettering to be done on the back. Just a few minutes more, and he would bring it to my house. "No, I will wait and take it myself," I said, rather vexed. Besides, I knew that to stamp a few letters on a book-cover could not take more than a few minutes at most. "Well, if you are so good as to wait, it will not take long. There is a fire in the oven, I have only just got to heat the screw." And so saying, he placed a chair for me, dusted it with the flap of his coat, and I sat down to wait. Seinwill really took my book out of the press quite finished except for the lettering on the cover, and began to hurry. Now he is by the oven--from the oven to the corner--and once more to the oven and back to the corner--and so on ten times over, saying to me every time: "There, directly, directly, in another minute," and back once more across the room. So it went on for about ten minutes, and I began to take quite an interest in this running of his from one place to another, with empty hands, and doing nothing but repeat "Directly, directly, this minute!" Most of all I wonder why he keeps on looking into the corner--he never takes his eyes off that corner. What is he looking for, what does he expect to see there? I watch his face growing sadder--he must be suffering from something or other--and all the while he talks to himself, "Directly, directly, in one little minute." He turns to me: "I must ask you to wait a little longer. It will be very soon now--in another minute's time. Just because we want it so badly, you'd think she'd rather burst," he said, and he went back to the corner, stooped, and looked into it. "What are you looking for there every minute?" I ask him.