sprang a new leak. When my mother discovered the damage she
made me tell the story of the accident over and over again,
wringing her hands and sighing as she listened. The average
mother in our town would have given me a whipping in the
circumstances. She did not

CHAPTER II WE lived in a deep basement, in a large, dusky room
that we shared with three other families, each family occupying
one of the corners and as much space as it was able to wrest.
Violent quarrels were a commonplace occurrence, and the
question of floor space a staple bone of contention. The huge
brick oven in which the four housewives cooked dinner was
another prolific source of strife. Fights over pots were as frequent
and as truculent as those over the children

Of our room-mates I best recall a bookbinder and a retired old
soldier who mended old sheepskin coats for a living. My
memories of home are inseparable from the odors of sheepskin
and paste and the image of two upright wooden screws (the
bookbinder's "machine"). The soldier had finished his term of
military service years before, yet he still wore his uniform--a
dilapidated black coat with new brass buttons, and a similar
overcoat of a coarse gray material. Also, he still shaved his chin,
sporting a pair of formidable gray side-whiskers. Shaving is one of
the worst sins known to our faith, but, somehow, people
overlooked it in one who had once been compelled to practise it
in the army. Otherwise the furrier or sheepskin tailor was an
extremely pious man. He was very kind to me, so that his military
whiskers never awed me. Not so his lame, tall wife, who often hit
me with one of her crutches.