"Enough that I knew it.
"Well, 'and he kept the thing in his heart.' I waited, for I was not going to plague the Rebbe about a trifle. I waited. I was living just then a mile outside Vorke. My first wife was alive, and she did not fare badly, though it was difficult to make both ends meet. But I earned whatever it was by my match-making, and my wife supported us by means of her stall. And not only us, but also she provided for a married couple, my eldest daughter and her husband, who was an excellent scholar. What, then, was lacking?
"And it came to pass on a day that my son-in-law was away at the Ger Rebbe's, there was a fair in the town, and my daughter was in child-bed. It went hard with her, a first baby. Beile Bashe, the midwife, was at her wit's end, and this was the third day of her pains. No cupping, no blood-letting seemed to help—things were very bad. And I hear that the Rebbe is coming to a circumcision.
"What do you think? 'There sprang up light for the Jews!' We were all overjoyed. It put new life into us. We pray that God will preserve her another day and a half, because people were only let in an hour before the ceremony. But meanwhile things got worse and worse, she was near death.
"An hour or two before the ceremony, however, she grew easier, or so it seemed to me. She came to herself, opened her eyes, urged her mother to go to the fair, and called me to her bedside. A foolish woman, they are all alike—they blame us for it.
"She doesn't like Shmülek, she says, she never liked him, she didn't want him from the very first. She can't stand him and had better die. She had sent her mother out on purpose, because she was afraid of her. She, peace be upon her, was a terror to the children—she wanted to slap her daughter on her wedding-day.
"I, of course, gave her to understand that all women are the same, that some even make a vow never to live with their husbands again; that the sin-offering is there on that account—some even swear that—'but no one may be held responsible for what he utters in pain and grief.' But she keeps to it, she bids me farewell, she needs no vows, no oaths, she says, smiling. I am going out, she says, like a candle.
"Well, I listen to her and can see all the while that she is better. She is quite clear again in her mind, and it only wants half an hour to the circumcision. And she looked quite pretty again.
"I sit by the bed and talk to her—even the midwife had gone to buy a cradle at the fair. I look at the clock—it is time to go. I look at her. Upon my word! Quite well! And yet I do not want to go and leave her all alone, and nearly alone in the town.
"The fair, you see, comes once a year, and lasts three days, and it means Parnosseh for the whole twelve months. So, you see, there was no one left at the Rebbe's even—every soul was off to the fair.