spark of animation
visited his eye. Only one thought survived in his brain, and one desire
pulsed in his heart: to save money enough for himself and family to
hurry back to his native village. Blind and dead to everything, he moved
about with a dumb, lacerating pain in his heart,--he longed for home.
Before he found steady employment, he walked daily with titanic strides
through the entire length of Manhattan, while children and even adults
often slunk into byways to let him pass. Like a huge monster he seemed,
with an arrow in his vitals.

In the shop where he found a job at last, the workmen feared him at
first; but, ultimately finding him a harmless giant, they more than once
hurled their sarcasms at his head. Of the many men and women employed
there, only one person had the distinction of getting fellowship from
old Zelig. That person was the Gentile watchman or janitor of the shop,
a little blond Pole with an open mouth and frightened eyes. And many
were the witticisms aimed at this uncouth pair. "The big one looks like
an elephant," the joker of the shop would say; "only he likes to be fed
on pennies instead of peanuts."

"Oi, oi, his nose would betray him," the "philosopher" of the shop
chimed in; and during the dinner hour he would expatiate thus: "You
see, money is his blood. He starves himself to have enough dollars to
go back to his home: the Pole told me all about it. And why should he
stay here? Freedom of religion means nothing to him, he never goes to
synagogue; and freedom of the press? Bah--he never even reads the
conservative Tageblatt!"

Old Zelig met such gibes with stoicism. Only rarely would he turn up
the whites of his eyes, as if in the act of ejaculation; but he would
soon contract his heavy brows into a scowl and emphasize the last with
a heavy thump of his sizzling iron.

When the frightful cry of the massacred Jews in Russia rang across
the Atlantic, and the Ghetto of Manhattan paraded one day through
the narrow streets draped in black, through the erstwhile clamorous
thoroughfares steeped in silence, stores and shops bolted, a wail of
anguish issuing from every door and window--the only one remaining
in his shop that day was old Zelig. His fellow-workmen did not call
upon him to join the procession. They felt the incongruity of "this
brute" in line with mourners in muffled tread. And the Gentile watchman
reported the next day that the moment the funeral dirge of the music
echoed from a