misfortune to pass by Madame Barkany, his best customer, with a
vacant stare, under the impression that the fair apparition was
linen hung to bleach in the sun.

Kalimann worked alone with a little apprentice named Hersch, whom he
had indentured far more from charity than necessity, since the
worthy bookbinder felt within him that love for his art which would
have enabled him to bind the entire literature of Europe with no
greater aid than his good right arm. He was a conscientious,
faithful workman, and, as a rule, his entire days were spent in his
shop; when necessity demanded he would toil on late into the night
by the light of a tallow candle, or an ill-smelling lamp.

His work was his pride; reading his delight. If a single dark spot
clouded the surface of this simple honest life, that shadow fell
from the portly form of Mrs. Rachel Kalimann, or Rose Hunyadi, as it
was that lady's pleasure now to be called. It would be unjust,
however, to the handsome woman, whose buxom proportions served, as
it were, to give weight to the establishment, to say that her faults
were of a serious nature; she was, at the most, insensible to her
husband's intellectual aspirations, which she termed, with more
vigor than the occasion demanded, "stuff and nonsense."

Quotations from the Talmud and the Scriptures were equally impotent
to quell the torrent of the worthy woman's eloquence when she felt
that the occasion demanded her timely interference; in vain Kalimann
supported his side of the question by citing from the book of Job:
"The gold and the crystal cannot equal it, and the exchange of it
shall not be for jewels of fine gold. No mention shall be made of
coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies."