He wore glasses, long hair, carried an umbrella and a green bag; in fact, one might have met him in a vegetarian restaurant. He was pointed out to me as a noted radical, a dreamer, who writes for the "Vorwärts," works as a tailor in a sweat-shop, and is said to be writing a book. A comely young maiden, with a madonna-like face, came near the store. She had a few mayflowers in her hand--and gave them to a ragged little child standing there. She came in and bought a paper. She did not read Yiddish; but it was for her father. She was a college student, I was told, of advanced ideas, but deeply in love with the people of the Ghetto and their beliefs--was planning to devote her life to settlements and social reform work--one of the many dreamers who came into this store. "Once," said my guide, "I told her that I would put her into a book. 'Thank you,' she answered. 'I don't want to sink into oblivion so soon.' But she is an idyl of the Ghetto just the same. Look; here are the poems of David Edelstaat. He sleeps now in a lonely grave in the Jewish cemetery at Denver, Colorado, by the side of the fence, for he was a delinquent in Israel. He went there by way of the corroding sweat-shop and a damp cellar in New York, where he edited a little communist weekly. Many of our idealists go to Denver this way. It is the only time they travel and take a vacation. The hospitals there are crowded. But Edelstaat's poems, they are a sacred treasure among the Jewish working people." XX The Purpose of Immoral Plays The smoke was so thick and the din so heavy, that I did not see him when I came in and barely heard his shouted greeting. Such was the crowded condition of the regular resort on Saturday night; yet I found Keidansky tucked up in a corner of the café, "oblivious to the obvious," around him, with a pile of newspapers in his hands. "The group" had not as yet assembled, so my friend was reading. "This has been a great week," he said with gladsome emphasis, after we had exchanged courtesies. I at once suspected what he meant. "A great week," I said, "because you have been able to see humanity piteously dissected, human beings mercilessly analyzed, souls stript of their raiment, wounded and bleeding, our fellow-men on exhibition, crippled by custom and walking on the crutches of convention, our best arrangements of life held up to ridicule and scorn. A great week," I said, "because you have fed on tragedy like a fiend?"