d himself, trying to smile, but his pulses
thumped, and in the tumult of heart and brain he was not sure he knew
her right hand from her left. Fortunately he caught the glitter of the
diamond in the gloom, and instinctively his robber hand closed upon
it.

But as he felt the warm responsive clasp of those soft fingers, that
ancient delicious thrill pierced every vein. Fool that he had been to
doubt that dear hand! And it was wearing his ring still--she could not
part with it! O blundering male ingrate!

'My treasure! My angel!' he murmured ecstatically.

THE YIDDISH 'HAMLET'

THE YIDDISH 'HAMLET'

I

The little poet sat in the East-side cafe looking six feet high.
Melchitsedek Pinchas--by dint of a five-pound note from Sir Asher
Aaronsberg in acknowledgement of the dedication to him of the poet's
'Songs of Zion'--had carried his genius to the great new Jewry across
the Atlantic. He had arrived in New York only that very March, and
already a crowd of votaries hung upon his lips and paid for all that
entered them. Again had the saying been verified that a prophet is
nowhere without honour save in his own country. The play that had
vainly plucked at the stage-doors of the Yiddish Theatres of Europe
had already been accepted by the leading Yiddish theatre of New York.
At least there were several Yiddish Theatres, each claiming this
supreme position, but the poet felt that the production of his play at
Goldwater's Theatre settled the question among them.

'It is the greatest play of the generation,' he told the young
socialists and free-thinkers who sat around him this Friday evening
imbibing chocolate. 'It will be translated into every tongue.' He had
passed with a characteristic bound from satisfaction with the Ghetto
triumph into cosmopolitan anticipations. 'See,' he added, 'my initials
make M.P.--Master Playwright.'

'Also Mud Pusher,' murmured from the next table Ostrovsky, the
socialist leader, who found himself almost deserted for the new lion.
'Who is this uncombed bunco-steerer?'

'He calls himself the "sweet singer in Israel,"' contemptuously
replied Ostrovsky's remaining parasite.

'But look here, Pinchas,' interposed Benjamin Tuch, another of the
displaced demigods, a politician with a delusion that he swayed
Presidential elections by his prestige in Brooklyn. 'You said the
other day that your initials made "Messianic Poet."'

'And don't they?' inquired the poet, his Dantesque, if din