"Man-dog nothing," she protested, addressing herself to me. "He was as handsome as gold in those whiskers. He looked like a regular monarch in them." And then to him: "I suppose it was that treasure of a wife you have who told you to have them taken off. It's a lucky thing she does not order you to have your foolish head taken off."
"You better shut up, mamma," he said, sternly. And she did
He called to see his parents quite frequently, sometimes with some of his children, but never with his wife, at least not while I lived there.
Crassly illiterate save for his ability to read some Hebrew, without knowing the meaning of the words, he enjoyed a considerable degree of native intellectual alertness, and in his crude, untutored way was a thinker
One evening he took to quizzing me on my plans, partly in Yiddish
and partly in broken English, which he uttered with a strong
Cockney accent, a relic of the several years he had spent in
London.
"And what will you do after you finish (he pronounced it "fiendish") college?" he inquired, with a touch of derision
"I shall take up some higher things," I rejoined, reluctantly
"And what do you call 'higher things'?" he pursued in his quizzical, browbeating way. "Are you going to be a philosopher?"
"Yes, I shall be a doctor of philosophy," I answered, frostily
"What's that? You want to be both a doctor and a philosopher? But you know the saying, 'Many trades—few blessings.'"