'That is true.' The table was visibly stimulated, as though the chocolate had turned into champagne. The word 'modern' stirred the souls of these refugees from the old Ghettos like a trumpet; unbelief, if only in ghosts, was oxygen to the prisoners of a tradition of three thousand years. The poet perceived his moment. He laid a black-nailed finger impressively on the right side of his nose. 'I translated Shakespeare--yes, but into modern terms. The Ghost vanished--Hamlet's tragedy remained only the internal incapacity of the thinker for the lower activity of action.' The men of action pricked up their ears. 'The higher activity, you mean,' corrected Ostrovsky. 'Thought,' said Benjamin Tuch, 'has no value till it is translated into action.' 'Exactly; you've got to work it up,' said Colonel Klopsky, who had large ranching and mining interests out West, and, with his florid personality, looked entirely out of place in these old haunts of his. '_Schtuss_ (nonsense)!' said the poet disrespectfully. 'Acts are only soldiers. Thought is the general.' Witberg demurred. 'It isn't much use _thinking_ about playing the violin, Pinchas.' 'My friend,' said the poet, 'the thinker in music is the man who writes your solos. His thoughts exist whether you play them or not--and independently of your false notes. But you performers are all alike--I have no doubt the leading man who plays my Hamlet will imagine his is the higher activity. But woe be to those fellows if they change a syllable!' '_Your_ Hamlet?' sneered Ostrovsky. 'Since when?' 'Since I re-created him for the modern world, without tinsel and pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony; since--even the cream of this tart is sour--since I carried him to and fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the pouch of the mother.' 'Then Iselmann did not produce it?' asked the Heathen Journalist, who haunted the East Side for copy, and pronounced Pinchas 'Pin-cuss.' 'No, I changed his name to Eselmann, the Donkey-man. For I had hardly read him ten lines before he brayed out, "Where is the Ghost?" "The Ghost?" I said. "I have laid him. He cannot walk on the modern stage." Eselmann tore his hair. "But it is for the Ghost I had him translated. Our Yiddish audiences love a ghost." "They love your acting, too," I replied witheringly. "But I am not here to consider the tastes of the mob." Oh, I gave the Donkey-man a piece of my mind.' 'But he didn't take the piece!' jested Grunbitz, who in Poland had been a _Badchan_ (marriage-jester), and was now a Zionist editor.