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.