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removing his short-stemmed pipe from his mouth.
    Mother was silent for a minute, and even seated herself, but presently she sprang to her feet again and made for the door.
    The soldier’s wife seized her by an arm.
    “Where are you going? To the Sands? Are you crazy? If you start a quarrel over there you’ll never come back alive.”
    “I don’t care!”
    She wrenched herself free and left the room.
    Half an hour later she came back beaming.
    “His father is a lovely Gentile,” she said. “He went out, brought his murderer of a boy home, took off his belt, and skinned him alive.”
    “A good Gentile,” the soldier’s wife commented, admiringly.
    There was always a pile of logs somewhere in our Court, the property of some family that was to have it cut up for firewood. This was our great gathering-place of a summer evening. Here we would bandy stories (often of our own inventing) or discuss things, the leading topic of conversation being the soldiers of the two regiments that were stationed in our town. We saw a good deal of these soldiers, and we could tell their officers, commissioned or non-commissioned, by the number of stars or bands on their shoulder-straps. Also, we knew the names of their generals, colonels, and some of their majors or captains. The more important manœuvers took place a great distance from Abner’s Court, but that did not matter. If they occurred on a Saturday, when we were free from school—and, as good luck would have it, they usually did—many of us, myself invariably included, would go to see them. The blare of trumpets, the beat of drums, the playing of the band, the rhythmic clatter of thousands of feet, the glint or rows and rows of bayonets, the red or the blue of the uniforms, the commanding officer on his mount, the spirited singing of the men marching back to barracks—all this would literally hold me spellbound.
    That we often played soldiers goes without saying, but we played “hares” more often, a game in which the counting was done by means of senseless words like the American “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Sometimes we would play war, with the names of the belligerents borrowed from the Old Testament, and once in a while we would have a real “war” with the boys of the next street.
    I was accounted one of the strong fellows among the boys of Abner’s Court as well as one of the conspicuous figures among them. Compactly built, broad-shouldered, with a small, firm mouth like my mother’s, a well-formed nose and large, dark eyes, I was not a homely boy by any means, nor one devoid of a certain kind of magnetism.
    One of my recollections is of my mother administering a tongue-lashing to a married young woman whom she had discovered flirting in the dark vestibule with a man not her husband.
    A few minutes later the young woman came in and begged my mother not to tell her husband.
    “If I was your husband I would skin you alive.”
    “Oh, don’t tell him! Take pity! Don’t.”
    “I won’t. Get out of here, you lump of stench.”
    “Oh, swear that you won’t tell him! Do swear, dearie. Long life to you. Health to every little bone of yours.”
    “First you swear that you’ll never do it again, you heap of dung.”
    “Strike me blind and dumb and deaf if I ever do it again. There.”
    “Your oaths are worth no more than the barking of a dog. Can’t you be decent? You ought to be knouted in the market-place. You are a plague. Black luck upon you. Get away from me.”
    “But I will be decent. May I break both my legs and both my arms if I am not. Do swear that you won’t tell him.”
    My mother yielded.
    She was passionately devout, my mother. Being absolutely illiterate, she would murmur meaningless words, in the singsong of a prayer, pretending to herself that she was performing her devotions. This, however, she would do with absolute earnestness and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy coming to her eyes. To be sure, she knew how to bless the Sabbath candles