But the old man could not sleep that night. A few days later he was short of a couple of thousand dollars to pay a bill. He lacked the old-time courage to ring up one of his business friends. He could have gotten the money from his bank, but there too his courage failed him.
Little by little, yet rapidly enough, it was whispered about that the wealthy grocer was not as solid as had been thought. Six months after the wedding of his second daughter the red flag of the auctioneer hung in front of the store for the benefit of the creditors.
"But how did it all happen?" asked his first son-in-law, the furrier when he arrived from Chicago, at the news of the calamity.
Broken down, old, worn, sick, Moishe Goldberg moaned:
"Because my daughter married a bookkeeper."
THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK
The Mastodon has disappeared but we are still pestered by flies.
The whole story could be told in one paragraph, nay, in one statement contradicting bluntly a biological law, the survival of the fittest. But these laws are so pliable one is as much afraid to contradict as the promulgators were afraid to establish them. So I am to tell the story as gently and as objectively as the matter on hand will permit.