"Good holiday, Mr. Kaplan!" I called out to him

"Good holiday! Good holiday, David!" he returned, amiably. "Here already? Ahead of me? That's good! Just follow the path of Judaism and everything will be all right." "How's everybody?" I asked

"All are well, thank God."

"How's Fanny?"

"Now you're talking. That's the real question, isn't it?" he chaffed me, with dignity. "She's well, thank God."

He introduced me to the cantor--a pug-nosed man with a pale face and a skimpy little beard of a brownish hue

"Our new cantor, the celebrated Jacob Goldstein!" he said. "And this is Mr.

David Levinsky, my intended son-in-law. An Antomir man. Was a fine scholar over there and still remembers a lot of Talmud."

The newly arrived synagogue tenor was really a celebrated man, in the Antomir section of Russia, at least. His coming had been conceived as a sensational feature of the opening of the new synagogue. While "town cantor" in Antomir he had received the highest salary ever paid there. The contract that had induced him to come over to America pledged him nearly five times as much. Thus the New York Sons of Antomir were not only able to parade a famous cantor before the multitude of other New York congregations, but also to prove to the people at home that they were the financial superiors of the whole town of their birth. So far, however, as the New York end of the sensation was concerned, there was a good-sized bee in the honey. The imported cantor was a tragic disappointment. The trouble was that his New York audiences were far more critical and exacting than the people in Antomir, and he was not up to their standard. For one thing, many of the Sons of Antomir, and others who came to their synagogue to hear the new singer, people who had mostly lived in poverty and ignorance at home, now had a piano or a violin in the house, with a son or a daughter to play it, and had become frequenters of the Metropolitan Opera House or the Carnegie Music Hall; for another, the New York Ghetto was full of good concerts and all other sorts of musical entertainments, so much so that good music had become all but part of the daily life of the Jewish tenement population; for a third, the audiences of the imported cantor included people who had lived in much larger European cities than Antomir, in such places as Warsaw, Odessa, Lemberg, or Vienna, for example, where they had heard much better cantors than Goldstein. Then, too, life in New York had Americanized my fellow-townspeople, modernized their tastes, broadened them out. As a consequence, the methods of the man who had won the admiration of their native town seemed to them old-fashioned, crude, droll

Still, the trustees, and several others who were responsible for the coming of the pug-nosed singer, persisted in speaking of him as "a greater tenor than Jean de Rezske," and my prospective father-in-law was a trustee, and a good-natured man to boot, so he had compassion for him

"In the old country when we meet a new-comer we only say, 'Peace to you,'" I remarked to the cantor, gaily. "Here we say this and something else, besides. We ask him how he likes America."

"But I have not yet seen it," the cantor returned, with a broad smile in which his pug nose seemed to grow in size

I told him the threadbare joke of American newspaper reporters boarding an incoming steamer at Sandy Hook and asking some European celebrity how he likes America hours before he has set foot on its soil

"That's what we call 'hurry up,'" Kaplan remarked

"That means quick, doesn't it?" the cantor asked, with another broad smile

"You're picking up English rather fast," I jested

"He has not only a fine voice, but a fine head, too," Kaplan put in

"I know what 'all right' means, too," the cantor laughed. I thought there was servility in his laugh, and I ascribed it to the lukewarm reception with which he had met. I was touched We talked of Antomir, and although a conversation of this kind was nothing new to me, yet what he said of the streets, market-places, the bridge, the synagogues, and of some of the people of the town interested me inexpressibly

Presently the service was begun--not by the imported singer, but by an amateur from among the worshipers, the service on a Passover evening not being considered important enough to be conducted by a professional cantor of consequence

My heart was all in Antomir, in the good old Antomir of synagogues and Talmud scholars and old-fashioned marriages, not of college students, revolutionists, and Matildas

When the service was over I stepped up close to the Holy Ark and recited the Prayer for the Dead, in chorus with several other men and boys. As I cast a glance at my "memorial candle" my mother loomed saintly through its flame. I beheld myself in her arms, a boy of four, on our way to the synagogue, where I was to be taught to parrot the very words that I was now saying for her spirit

The Prayer for the Dead was at an end. "A good holiday! A merry holiday!" rang on all sides, as the slender crowd streamed chatteringly toward the door

Mr. Kaplan, the cantor, and several other men, clustering together, lingered to bandy reminiscences of Antomir, interspersing them with "bits of law."

CHAPTER IX The Kaplans occupied a large, old house on Henry Street that had been built at a period when the neighborhood was considered the best in the city. While Kaplan and I were taking off our overcoats in the broad, carpeted, rather dimly lighted hall, a dark-eyed girl appeared at the head of a steep stairway

"Hello, Dave! You're a good boy," she shouted, joyously, as she ran down to meet me with coquettish complacency

She had regular features, and her face wore an expression of ease and self-satisfaction. Her dark eyes were large and pretty, and altogether she was rather good-looking. Indeed, there seemed to be no reason why she should not be decidedly pretty, but she was not. Perhaps it was because of that self-satisfied air of hers, the air of one whom nothing in the world could startle or stir. Temperamentally she reminded me somewhat of Miss Kalmanovitch, but she was the better-looking of the two. I was not in love with her, but she certainly was not repulsive to me

"Good holiday, dad! Good holiday, Dave!" she saluted us in Yiddish, throwing out her chest and squaring her shoulders as she reached us

She was born in New York and had graduated at a public grammar-school and English was the only language which she spoke like one born to speak it, and yet her Yiddish greeting was precisely what it would have been had she been born and bred in Antomir

Her "Good holiday, dad. Good holiday, Dave!" went straight to my heart

"Well, I've brought him to you, haven't I? Are you pleased?" her father said, with affectionate grimness, in Yiddish

"Oh, you're a dandy dad. You're just sweet," she returned, in English, putting up her red lips as if he were her baby. And this, too, went to my heart

When her father had gone to have his shoes changed for slippers and before her mother came down from her bedroom, where she was apparently dressing for supper, Fanny slipped her arm around me and I kissed her lips and eyes

A chuckle rang out somewhere near by. Standing in the doorway of the back parlor, Mefisto-like, was Mary, Fanny's twelve-year-old sister

"Shame!" she said, gloatingly

"The nasty thing!" Fanny exclaimed, half gaily, half in anger

"You're nasty yourself," returned Mary, making faces at her sister

"Shut up or I'll knock your head off."

"Stop quarreling, kids," I intervened. Then, addressing myself to Mary, "Can you spell 'eavesdropping'?"

Mary laughed

"Never mind laughing," I insisted. "Do you know what eavesdropping means? Is it a nice thing to do? Anyhow, when you're as big as Fanny and you have a sweetheart, won't you let him kiss you?" As I said this I took Fanny's hand tenderly

"She has sweethearts already," said Fanny. "She is running around with three boys."

"I ain't," Mary protested, pouting.

"Well, three sweethearts means no sweetheart at all," I remarked

Fanny and I went into the front parlor, a vast, high-ceiled room, as large as the average four-room flat in the "modern apartment-house" that had recently been completed on the next block. It was drearily too large for the habits of the East Side of my time, depressingly out of keeping with its sense of home. It had lanky pink-and-gold furniture and a heavy bright carpet, all of which had a forbidding effect. It was as though the chairs and the sofa had been placed there, not for use, but for storage. Nor was there enough furniture to give the room an air of being inhabited, the six pink-and-gold pieces and the marble-topped center-table losing themselves in spaces full of gaudy desolation