brass, all beaten over with little pocks. Things--cups, trays, knockers,
ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated
sizes. Jardinieres with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A
swinging-lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of
tubular chimes, prisms of voiceless harmony and of heatless light.

Opening this door, they rang gently, like melody heard through water and
behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley
operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things
and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another
bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the
front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking
clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping union suits in a
mid-air flaky with soot.

Often at lunch, or even the evening meal, this bell would ring in on
Abrahm Kantor's digestive well-being, and while he hurried down, napkin
often bib-fashion still about his neck, and into the smouldering lanes
of copper, would leave an eloquent void at the head of his
well-surrounded table.

This bell was ringing now, jingling in upon the slumber of a still newer
Kantor, snuggling peacefully enough within the ammoniac depths of a
cradle recently evacuated by Leon, heretofore impinged upon you.

On her knees before an oven that billowed forth hotly into her face,
Mrs. Kantor, fairly fat and not yet forty, and at the immemorial task of
plumbing a delicately swelling layer-cake with broom-straw, raised her
face, reddened and faintly moist.