Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street. Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables. Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the lively scene. “Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.” The young dramatist smiled. “Good God,” he thought, “where do they come from. Where are they going? No place to no place. But always moving, shuffling, waddling, crying out. The sun shines on them. The rain pours on them. It burns. It freezes. Today they are bright with color. Tomorrow they are grey with gloom. But they are always the same, always in motion.” The young dramatist stopped on the corner and looking around him spied a figure sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building. The figure was an old man. He had a long white beard. He had his legs tucked under him and an upturned tattered hat rested in his lap. His thin face was raised and the sun beat down on it, but his eyes were closed. “Asleep,” mused Moisse. He moved closer to him. The man’s head was covered with long silky white hair that hung down to his neck and hid his ears. It was uncombed. His face in the sun looked like the face of an ascetic, thin, finely veined. He had a long nose and almost colorless lips and the skin on his cheeks was white. It was drawn tight over his bones, leaving few wrinkles. An expression of peace rested over him—peace and detachment. Of the noise and babble he heard nothing. His eyes were closed to the crowded frantic street. He sat, his head back, his face bathed in the sun, smileless and dreaming. “A beggar,” thought Moisse, “asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his thoughts and his dreams?” Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened. He was looking at the beggar’s long hair that hung to his neck. “It’s moving,” he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head. The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone.... It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided.... “Lice,” murmured Moisse. He watched. Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his hair moved. Vermin swarmed through it creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal.