About fifty years ago a group of street-idlers and passers-by were standing at the corner of one of the narrow and old-fashioned streets near the old harbor of Marseilles, amusing themselves at the plight of a short, dark-complexioned man who stood in their midst, and who was evidently a foreigner and a stranger in the town. It was a typical early summer day in one of the busiest spots of the metropolis of southern France. The sun shone with a brilliance and a radiance characteristic of the region and the season, and was just a little too warm for comfort; and the streets were crowded with a motley throng partly composed of Frenchmen, among whom the natives of northern France and the provençals or inhabitants of the south could be easily distinguished from each other by their diversity of type, and partly by representatives of various races and nationalities varying in shade from the olive-skinned Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks to the coffee-brown Arabs and Moors from northern Africa, with here and there among the throng a negro of ebony blackness. [Illustration: A GROUP OF STREET-IDLERS WERE AMUSING THEMSELVES AT THE PLIGHT OF A SHORT, DARK-COMPLEXIONED MAN WHO STOOD IN THEIR MIDST _Page 142_] The great press upon the streets was due in part to the normal activity of the town; but more to the fact that three of the great sailing vessels which, in those ante-steam-navigation days managed the freight and passenger traffic between the Levantine ports, had that morning discharged their human cargoes at three of the principal wharves in the neighborhood, and the stream of released passengers was flowing through the adjacent streets before becoming commingled with the general human flood of the city. There were many strange figures among the new arrivals, but they all appeared fairly at home in their new surroundings. Some may have been in Marseilles on previous occasions, and others were met by relatives or friends who guided them to their respective destinations. Thus all were cared for in the strange city except one, and he the woe-begone individual whom we have seen standing at the street corner amidst the knot of street _gamins_ and loiterers. They had fine sport with him, commenting on his outlandish appearance, and asking him all sorts of facetious questions in the vulgar _argot_ they spoke; but he understood nothing, and only looked helplessly from one unsympathetic face to the other, saying only occasionally in a dazed sort of way, to the one or the other, in what seemed to them an unintelligible gibberish, the mystic words, “_Yehudi Attah? Yehudi Attah?_” Every such utterance would be greeted with a shout of laughter; that is to say, by all except one.