"What do you mean by 'sometimes'? When I have a ruble, I buy."
"And when not?"
"I get one."
"How?"
"What do you mean by 'how'?"
And it is an hour before I find out that Levi Yitzchock Bärenpelz is a bit of a rabbinical assistant, and acts as arbiter in quarrels; a bit of a commission-agent, a fragment of a merchant, a morsel of a match-maker, and now and again, when the fancy takes him, a messenger.
Thanks to all these "trades," the counted and the forgotten ones, he earns his bread, although with toil and trouble, for wife and child—even for the married daughter, because her father-in-law is but a pauper.
——
THE SECOND ATTEMPT
I am taken into a shop.