The husband dead and she left with four small children, the woman had to apply to charity. An investigator was sent and she found the family on the verge of starvation. As she was speaking to the applicant an old man, with grey beard and bent shoulders, came in.

"Who is he?"

"My father," the widow answered.

Further questions brought out the fact that the old man had lived in his daughter's house since his wife died; that he was too weak and old to earn his living and consequently fed on his daughter's fare. The investigator insinuated that the old man would have to be placed in a "Home." The widow cried and vowed that she would never part with her father, and the children surrounded their grandfather as though he was in actual danger of his life. The result was to be foreseen. A week's hunger brought the widow to the office, where she agreed to part with her father, so that her children might live.

The old man took no active part in the controversy concerning his future. Apathetic, he would sit near the open window and read the Psalms. He said no word when his daughter announced to him what the outcome was. A few minutes later he asked: "When am I to go?" Then he packed his belongings, the "Tefilin" prayer books, and was ready.

Thus are the people of woe ready to wander. He has been in many lands and many a time he has had to leave his abode, go from east to west, north to south.

That very night he slept in the "Home."

Home! the most horrible word for the poor. Home! The whole world calls home the place where one lives. For the poor, the old ones who cannot work any longer, "the Home" is the place where they die. It's the place that stamps them, brands them as eternal paupers. It's the crowning glory of a life of work, manual work. I know you will say: "What else could we do with the poor, incapable of earning their living?" But now come with me down to a few "homes." Don't become ecstatic over the beauty of the lawn in front of the house, nor admire the cleanliness of the kitchen. Come down to look at the men. Do you see this old man there? The one with flowing white beard and bushy eyebrows? That old Jew has made chairs and tables all his life, has made your chair, too, and his neighbour there—the one with trembling hands—he has worked on coats and overcoats, enough for thousands. Look at his hands now. They tremble. Look at your coat. The seam is straight, you want a straight seam. He is here now, in a Home. Look at them all. They have worked all their lives long.

"Come here, old man. What is your trade?"

"A furrier."

"Old man, what is your trade?"

"A tinsmith."

"And yours? and yours? and yours?"

"Tailor, dressmaker, machinist"—every trade is represented.

The veterans of industry. The temple of Invalids.

The widow's father lived there only two months. I saw him buried in the cold ground. An old man from the Home stood near the grave.

"I wish to be buried right here," he said.

"Why?"

"I got used to him—we were neighbours. His bed was next to mine."

"What was the matter with the old Baruch?" I asked.

"The servants did not like him," he answered.

"Was he ill? I mean old Baruch."

"No, the servants did not like him."

"But that's no reason for a man to die!"

The old man looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows. His look said plainly: "You stupid ass." Then he turned away from me and mingled with the other people. He avoided me when I approached him.

On the next day I visited the Home again. It was meal time. They all sat around a big table, much like the one I had seen at the orphanage. In the orphanage are fatherless children, in the Homes childless fathers. They sat around the table and tried to chew what was on their plates. Their toothless mouths worked in vain. When the superintendent remarked to me that most of them have stomach ailments and I suggested that a dentist examine their teeth the lady could not stifle her laughter. She was herself a woman of sixty and her mouth was in perfect condition—it was the dentist's work of course.

After the meal was over I tried very hard to get some of the old men to talk. They had nothing to say—this was the answer I got from a few.

"Are you satisfied here?" I asked, to which one fine looking old fellow replied:

"It all depends what one expects, you know. In the Talmud is a story how a man, once very rich, was not satisfied with a supper that three poor men together would have been satisfied about."

I humoured the old fellow and got him to walk with me about the grounds. When out of hearing of the others he told me how the attendants beat every one of them for the slightest infraction of the rules of the house.

"Why don't you complain to the superintendent?" I suggested.

"The ones that do so shorten their lives."

"You mean?"

"Don't ask any further." A man understands closed lips.

In a rolling chair, at the further end of the garden, sat a paralysed old man.

"How are you feeling, Uncle?" I greeted him.

"Fine, fine," he answered. "I am all right, now."

"He is a lucky dog," remarked my companion, the old man of the Talmud story. "He is paralysed all over."

"Do you call that lucky?—man, it's the greatest misfortune."

"Not in a Home," he answered. "The paralysed are like the dead—they don't feel when they are hurt." Once his tongue was loosened the old man went on. "There is an attendant here, a brute. When he gets mad he runs around to find fault with some one, to hit him. Then we all get out of his way. This fellow here, he has a bad stomach. He would always be the scapegoat. My, how he would suffer. Only his legs got paralysed at first and he had to be turned over in his bed. When that drunkard would get through with him the poor fellow's body was black and blue from pinches and punches. Now he does not feel anything. He punches him and hits and pinches and gets mad to see that the fellow does not feel pain at all."

"Is that true?" I turned to the old man in the rolling chair.

"You bet it's true, and I have my revenge now, to see him get wild. 'Hullo, Harry! Why don't you pinch me a bit. Come on, Harry, have a pinch,' and he gets mad—like a savage."

I see you shake your head. Fiction! Fiction! Then read the letter sent by a young man and a young woman who worked at a "Home" in New York. The letter was printed in "Our Health" of January, 1913. The Institution did not even offer an excuse. Deny, it could not.

"The patients are mistreated, beaten, kicked, insulted," runs the letter. It has two signatures, the man's and the woman's. If this be not true, why did not the Montefiore Home sue the calumniators? But it is true. They keep quiet. They are afraid of revelations. Some old man or old woman might take his last days into his own hands and come out with the truth.

Another old man was punished by the attendant with two days' fast. He sat at the table but was forbidden to eat. The cause of the punishment was that the old man had soiled the tablecloth.

When visitors come the lawn is shown, the clean kitchen, the beautiful dining room, the spacious rooms. Nothing of the inhuman treatment to which the inmates are subject comes to light. The gross insults: "Beggar, schnorrer, pauper, liar," are not heard then.

One "Home" is under the same roof with an orphan house. Upstairs the children, downstairs the old people, as though it were a prophecy: "Here you start, there you finish."

The callousness of this shows the sentiment of the people supporting the institutions. An old woman, while peeling potatoes, remarked: "All they miss is a dressmaking shop between the floors and a cemetery in the yard and their whole life would stretch before them."