as found by the merest accident in the turning over of
the affairs of an orphan asylum. Some one had picked her up in the
street and brought her in. She could not tell her name, and, with one
given to her there, and garbed in the uniform of the place, she was so
effectually lost in the crowd that the police alarm failed to identify
her. In fact, her people had no little trouble in "proving property,"
and but for the mother love that had refused to part with a little
gingham slip her lost baby had worn, it might have proved impossible.
It was the mate of the one which Yette had on when she was brought
into the asylum, and which they had kept there. So the child was
restored, and her humble home made happy.

That was my first meeting with the Russian Jew. In after years my path
crossed his often. I saw him herded with his fellows like cattle in
the poorest tenements, slaving sullenly in the sweat-shop, or rising
in anger against his tyrant in strikes that meant starvation as the
price of his vengeance. And always I had a sense of groping in the
memories of the past for a lost key to something. The other day I met
him once more. It was at sunset, upon a country road in southern New
Jersey. I was returning with Superintendent Sabsovich from an
inspection of the Jewish colonies in that region. The cattle were
lowing in the fields. The evening breathed peace. Down the sandy road
came a creaking farm wagon loaded with cedar posts for a vineyard hard
by. Beside it walked a sunburned, bearded man with an axe on his
shoulder, in earnest conversation with his boy, a strapping young
fellow in overalls. The man walked as one who is tired after a hard
day's work, but his back was straight and he held his head high. He
greeted us with a frank nod, as one who meets an equal.

The superintendent looked after him with a smile. To me there came
suddenly the vision of the couple under the lamp, friendless and
shrinking, waiting for a hearing, always waiting; and, as in a flash,
I understood. I had found the key. The farmer there had it. It was the
Jew who had found himself.

It is eighteen years since the first of the south Jersey colonies was
started.[4] There had been a sudden, unprecedented immigration of
refugees from Russia, where Jew-baiting was then the orthodox pastime.
They lay in heaps in Castle Garden, helpless and penniless, and their
people in New York feared prescriptive measures. What to do with them
became a burning ques