nted gilt
stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds,
shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit
any one, second-hand furniture-shops with folding iron beds, a filthy
baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking
from pile to pile of rubbish, and a withered geranium in a tin can
whose label was hanging loose and showed rust-stains amid the dry
paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of voluble Jews in dark clothes,
and noisily playing children that catapulted into your legs. The
lunger-blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to
appreciate our freedom. A whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells
and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know
Ibsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of hungry Carl as he
roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking
jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe.

He felt that he, not these matter-of-fact crowds, was alien. He was
hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do--just go hungry.
There was no place where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny
hard-trodden parks were full.... If he could sit down, if he could
rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find freight-yards,
where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks
instead of gabbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country,
away from the brooding shadows of this town, where there were no
separable faces, but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds....

Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner
of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the
gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much
now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo,
that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt
very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to
any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal,
trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched
incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were
turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants
shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in
their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy.

And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered
over with a