McGuffey rising to the emergency
and discovering another and somewhat larger apartment in the next
house but two--"for one of the finest gintlemen ye ever saw and
that quiet," etc.--into which Jack would move and which the good
woman would insist on taking full charge of herself.
It was on one of these blessed and always welcome nights, after
the two had been dining at "a little crack in the wall," as Peter
called a near-by Italian restaurant, that he and Jack stopped to
speak to Isaac Cohen whom they found closing his shop for the
night. Cohen invited them in and Jack, after following the little
tailor through the deserted shop--all the work people had left--
found himself, to his great surprise, in a small room at the rear,
which Isaac opened with a key taken from his vest pocket, and
which even in the dim light of a single gas jet had more the
appearance of the den of a scholar, or the workshop of a
scientist, than the private office of a fashioner of clothes.
Peter only stayed a moment--long enough to borrow the second
volume of one of Isaac's books, but the quaint interior and what
it contained made a great impression on Jack,--so much so that
when the two had said good-night and mounted the stairs to Peter's
rooms, it was with increased interest that the boy listened to the
old fellow who stopped on every landing to tell him some incident
connected with the little tailor and his life: How after his
wife's death some years before, and his only daughter's marriage--
"and a great affair it was, my boy, I was there and know,"--Cohen
had moved down to his shop and fitted up the back room for a
little shelter of his own, where he had lived with his books and
his personal belongings and where he had met the queerest looking
people--with big heads and bushy beards--foreigners, some of them
--speaking all kinds of languages, as well as many highly educated
men in town.
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