“You must excuse me, Shonny,” said Mr. Finkelstein. “I didn't mean to make you maid. But I must haif my shoke, you know; I cain't help it. Vail, Solly, was de proposition saitisfaictory?”
“Well, Bubby, was Mr. Finkelstein's proposition satisfactory?” asked Mr. Marx.
“O, yes, sir! yes, indeed,” said I.
“Vail, all right; dot settles it,” concluded Mr. Finkelstein. “And now, Kraikory, I pay you your first veek's sailary in advaince, hey?” and he handed me a crisp twenty-five-cent paper piece.
I was trying, in the depths of my own mind, to calculate how long it would take me, at this rate, to earn the hundred dollars that I needed for my journey across the sea to my Uncle Florimond. The outlook was not encouraging. I remembered, though, a certain French proverb that my grandmother had often repeated to me, and I tried to find some consolation in it: “Tout vient à la fin à qui sait attendre”—Everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait.
CHAPTER IV—AT MR. FINKELSTEIN'S.
So you see me installed at Mr. Finkel-stein's as clerk, errand boy and general assistant. Next morning I entered upon the discharge of my duties, my kind employer showing me what to do and how to do it. Under his supervision I opened and swept out the store, dusted the counter, polished up the glass and nickel-work of the show-cases, and, in a word, made the place ship-shape and tidy for the day. Then we withdrew into the back parlor, and sat down to a fine savory breakfast that the old housekeeper Henrietta had laid there. She ate at table with us, but uttered not a syllable during the repast; and, much to my amazement, Mr. Finkelstein talked to me about her in her very presence as freely and as frankly as if she had been stone deaf, or a hundred miles away.
“She ain't exaictly what you call hainsome, Kraikory,” he said; “but she's as solid as dey make 'em. She was a second cousin of my deceased vife's, and she's vun of de graindest cooks in de United States of America. May be you don't believe it, hey? Vail, you shust vait till some day you eat vun of her big dinners, and den you'll see. I tell you what I do. When Solly gets back from de road I'll invite him and my daughter to dinner here de first Sunday aifternoon, shust on purpose for you to see de vay Henrietta can cook when she really settles down to pusiness. It's simply vunderful. You'll be surprised. De vay she cooks a raisined fish, sveet and sour—ach! it makes my mout vater shust to tink of it. Vail, she's awful goot-hearted-too, Kraikory; but so old—du lieber Herr! You couldn't hardly believe it. It's fearful, it's aictually fearful. Why, she's old enough to be my mudder, and I'm going on sixty-seven already. Dot's a solemn faict.”