I had not been to visit Wolffert and, indeed, had but a hazy idea of where he lived, knowing only that he had a room in the house of some Jew in the Jewish quarter. Hitherto our meetings had taken place either in John Marvel's narrow little quarters or in mine at the old Drummer's. But having learned from John that he was ill, I got the address from him, and one afternoon went over to see him. I found the place in a region more squalid than that in which John Marvel and I had our habitation and as foreign as if it had been in Judea or in a Black Sea province. In fact, it must have exhibited a mixture of both regions. The shops were small and some of them gay, but the gayest was as mean as the most sombre. The signs and notices were all in Yiddish or Russian, the former predominating, and as I passed through the ill-paved, ill-smelling, reeking streets I could scarcely retain my conviction that I was still in an American city. It was about the hour that the manufactories of clothing, etc., closed and the street through which I walked was filled with a moving mass of dark humanity that rolled through it like a dark and turgid flood. For blocks they filled the sidewalk, moving slowly on, and as I mingled in the mass, and caught low, guttural, unknown sounds, and not a word of English all the while, I became suddenly aware of a strange alien feeling of uncertainty and almost of oppression. Far as eye could see I could not descry one Saxon countenance or even one Teuton. They were all dark, sallow, dingy, and sombre. Now and then a woman's hat appeared in the level moving surge of round black hats, giving the impression of a bubble floating on a deep, slow current to melt into the flood. Could this, I reflected sombrely, be the element we are importing? and what effect would the strange confluence have on the current of our life in the future? No wonder we were in the throes of a strike vast enough to cause anxiety!

I was still under the dominion of this reflection when I reached the street in which Wolffert had his home, and, after some difficulty, discovered the house in which he had his abode.

The street was filled with wretched little shops, some more wretched than others, all stuck together in a curious jumble of tawdry finery and rusty necessities. Among them were many shops where second-hand clothing was exhibited, or, from appearances, clothing for which that term was a flattering euphemism. I stopped at one where second-hand shoes were hung out, and, opening the door to ask the way, faced a stout, shapeless woman with a leathery skin and a hooked nose, above which a pair of inquisitive black eyes rested on me, roving alternately from my feet to my face, with an expression of mingled curiosity, alarm, and hostility. I asked her if she could tell me where the number 1 wanted was, and as my inquiry caused not the least change of expression, I took out my card and wrote the number down. She gazed at it in puzzled silence, and then with a little lighting of her dark face, muttered a few unintelligible words and bustled back to where a curtain hung across the narrow shop, and lifting one corner of it gave a call which I made out to be something like "Jacob." The next moment a small, keen-looking boy made his way from behind the curtain and gazed at me. A few words passed between the two, in a tongue unknown to me, and then the boy, laying down a book that he carried in his hand, came forward and asked me in perfectly good English, "What is it you want?"

"I want to know where number 5260-1/2 —— Street is. I have that address, but cannot find the number."

"I'll show you." His eyes too were on my shoes. "The numbers of the streets were all taken down last year, and have not been put back yet. That is where Mr. Wolffert lives. Do you know him?"

"Yes, I am going to see him."

He turned and said something rapidly to his mother, in which the only word I recognized was Wolffert's name. The effect was instantaneous. The expression of vague anxiety died out of the woman's face and she came forward jabbering some sort of jargon and showing a set of yellow, scattering teeth.

"I'll show you where he lives. You come with me," said Jacob. "She thought you were an agent." He suddenly showed a much better set of teeth than his mother could display—"She don't speak English, you see." He had laid down his book on the counter and he now put on his cap. As he passed out of the door he paused and fastened his eyes on my feet. "You don't want a pair of shoes? We have all sorts—some as good as new. You can't tell. Half the price, too."

I declined the proffered bargain, and we walked up the street, Jacob discoursing volubly of many things, to show his superior intelligence.

"What was your book?" I inquired.

"U. S. History. I'm in the sixth grade."

"So? I should think you are rather small to be so high?" My ideas of grades were rather hazy, having been derived from "Tom Brown at Rugby" and such like encyclopÆdias.

"Pah! I stand next to head," he cried contemptuously.

"You do! Who stands head?"

"Iky Walthiemer—he's fourteen and I ain't but twelve. Then there is a fellow named Johnson—Jimmy Johnson. But he ain't nothin'!"

"He isn't? What's the matter with him?"

"He ain't got no eye on him—he don't never see nothin'."

"You mean he's dull?"

"Sure! Just mem'ry, that's all. He's dull. We beat 'em all."

"Who are 'we'?"

"We Jews."

"So——"

"Well, here we are. I'll run up and show you the door"—as we stopped at a little butcher shop beside which was a door that evidently led up a stair to the upper story.

"All right. You know Mr. Wolffert?"

"Sure! We all know him. He's a Jew, too."

"Sure!" I tried to imitate his tone, for it was not an accent only.

He ran up the stair and on up a second flight and back along a dark, narrow little passage, where he tapped on a door, and, without waiting, walked in.

"Here's a man to see you."

"A gentleman, you mean," I said dryly, and followed him, for I have a particular aversion to being referred to to my face as a mere man. It is not a question of natural history, but of manners.

"Well, Jacob," said Wolffert when he had greeted me, "have you got to the top yet?"

"Will be next week," said Jacob confidently.

I found Wolffert sitting up in a chair, but looking wretchedly ill. He, however, declared himself much better. I learned afterward—though not from him—that he had caught some disease while investigating some wretched kennels known as "lodging houses," where colonies of Jews were packed like herrings in a barrel; and for which a larger percentage on the value was charged as rental than for the best dwellings in the city. His own little room was small and mean enough, but it was comfortably if plainly furnished, and there were books about, which always give a homelike air, and on a little table a large bunch of violets which instantly caught my eye. By some inexplicable sixth sense I divined that they had come from Eleanor Leigh; but I tried to be decent enough not to be jealous; and Wolffert's manifest pleasure at seeing me made me feel humble.

We had fallen to talking of his work when I said, "Wolffert, why do you live in this horrible quarter? No wonder you get ill. Why don't you get a room in a more decent part of the town—near where John Marvel lives, for instance?"

Wolffert smiled.

"Why?—what is the matter with this?"

"Oh! Why, it is dreadful. Why, it's the dirtiest, meanest, lowest quarter of the city! I never saw such a place. It's full of stinking"—I was going to say "Jews"; but reflected in time to substitute "holes."

Wolffert, I saw, supplied the omitted objection.

"Do you imagine I would live among the rich?" he demanded; "I thought you knew me better. I don't want to be fattened in the dark like a Strasbourg goose for my liver to make food acceptable to their jaded appetites. Better be a pig at once."

"No, but there are other places than this—and I should think your soul would revolt at this—" I swung my arm in a half circle.

"Are they not my brethren?" he said, half smiling.

"Well, admit that they are—" (And I knew all along that this was the reason.) "There are other grades—brethren of nearer degree."

"None," he ejaculated. "'I dwell among my own people'—I must live among them to understand them."

"I should think them rather easy to understand."

"I mean to be in sympathy with them," he said gently. "Besides, I am trying to teach them two or three things."

"What?" For I confess that my soul had revolted at his surroundings. That surging, foreign-born, foreign-looking, foreign-spoken multitude who had filled the street as I came along through the vile reek of "Little Russia," as it was called, had smothered my charitable feelings.

"Well, for one thing, to learn the use of freedom—for another, to learn the proper method and function of organization."

"They certainly appear to me to have the latter already—simply by being what they are," I said lightly.

"I mean of business organization," Wolffert explained. "I want to break up the sweat shop and the sweat system. We are already making some headway, and have thousands in various kinds of organized business which are quite successful."

"I should not think they would need your assistance—from what I saw. They appear to me to have an instinct."

"They have," said Wolffert, "but we are teaching them how to apply it. The difficulty is their ignorance and prejudice. You think that they hold you in some distrust and dislike, possibly?" As his tone implied a question, I nodded.

"Well, that is nothing to the way in which they regard me. You they distrust as a gentile, but me they detest as a renegade."

"Well, I must say that I think you deserve what you get for bringing in such a mass of ignorance. Now, you are an American, and a patriotic one. How do you reconcile it with your patriotism to introduce into the body politic such an element of ignorance, superstition, and unrest?"

"Why," said Wolffert, "you don't know our people. The Jew is often an element of ignorance and superstition, though he is not alone in this, but he is never an element of unrest—when he is justly treated," he added after a pause. "But, whatever these people are in this generation, the next generation—the children of this generation—will be useful American citizens. All they require is a chance. Why, the children of these Russian Jews, baited from their own country, are winning all the prizes in the schools," he added, his pale face flushing faintly. "That lad who showed you in is the son of parents who sell second-hand shoes in the next street and cannot speak a word of English, and yet he stands at the head of his class."

"No, second!" I said.

"How do you know?"

"He told me."

"The little rascal! See how proud he is of it," said Wolffert triumphantly.

"He tried to sell me a pair of shoes."

Wolffert chuckled. "Did he?" Then he sobered, catching my thought. "That is the most important thing for him at present, but wait. Let this develop." He tapped his forehead. "He may give you laws equal to Kepler's or a new philosophy like Bacon's. He may solve aerial navigation—or revolutionize thought in any direction—who knows!"

His face had lighted up as he proceeded, and he was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes glowing.

"I know," I said, teasingly. "He'll sell shoes—second-hand ones polished up for new."

I was laughing, but Wolffert did not appreciate my joke. He flushed slightly.

"That's your gentile ignorance, my friend. That's the reason your people are so dense—they never learn—they keep repeating the same thing. No wonder we discover new worlds for you to claim!"

"What new worlds have you discovered?"

"Well, first, Literature, next commerce. What is your oldest boasted scripture?"

"I thought you were talking of material worlds!"

"We helped about that, too—did our full part. You think Queen Isabella pawned her jewels to send Christobal Colon to discover America—don't you?"

I nodded.

"Well, the man who put up the money for that little expedition was a Jew—'Arcangel, the Treasurer.' You never heard of him!"

"Never."

"He did it all the same. If you would read something else beside your narrow English writings, Glave, you would learn something of the true history of civilization." Now and then Wolffert's arrogance, like Antipater's, showed through the rents in his raiment.

"What for instance? since you appear to know it all."

"Well, almost any other history or philosophy. Read the work of the thinkers old and new—and see how much deeper life is than the shallow thing called by that divine name by the butterflies and insects and reptiles who flaunt their gauzy vans in our faces or fasten their brazen claws in our vitals. Meantime, you might read my book," he said with a smile, "when it comes out."

"Well, tell me about it meantime and save me the trouble. I sometimes prefer my friends to their books."

"You were always lazy," he said smiling. But he began to talk, laying down his philosophy of life, which was simple enough, though I could not follow him very far. I had been trained in too strict a school to accept doctrines so radical. And but that I saw him and John Marvel and Eleanor Leigh acting on them I should have esteemed them absolutely utopian. As it was, I wondered how far Eleanor Leigh had inspired his book.