She was the Reb's right hand and he did not care to let her know what his left was doing.
He retired to his study when Pinchas departed, and the Rebbitzin clattered about with a besom.
The study was a large square room lined with book-shelves and hung with portraits of the great continental Rabbis.

The books were bibliographical monsters to which the Family Bibles of the Christian are mere pocket-books.
They were all printed purely with the consonants, the vowels being divined grammatically or known by heart.

In each there was an island of text in a sea of commentary, itself lost in an ocean of super-commentary that was bordered by a continent of super-super-commentary.

Reb Shemuel knew many of these immense folios--with all their tortuous windings of argument and anecdote--much as the child knows the village it was born in, the crooked by-ways and the field paths.

Such and such a Rabbi gave such and such an opinion on such and such a line from the bottom of such and such a page--his memory of it was a visual picture.