to the wild delight of the
children" 95

"Please, your Honor, let this man go! It
is Christmas" 153

NEIGHBORS

THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET

"You get the money, or out you go! I ain't in the business for me health,"
and the bang of the door and the angry clatter of the landlord's boots on
the stairs, as he went down, bore witness that he meant what he said.

Judah Kapelowitz and his wife sat and looked silently at the little dark
room when the last note of his voice had died away in the hall. They knew
it well enough--it was their last day of grace. They were two months
behind with the rent, and where it was to come from neither of them knew.
Six years of struggling in the Promised Land, and this was what it had
brought them.

A hungry little cry roused the woman from her apathy. She went over and
took the baby and put it mechanically to her poor breast. Holding it so,
she sat by the window and looked out upon the gray November day. Her
husband had not stirred. Each avoided the question in the other's eyes,
for neither had an answer.

They were young people as men reckon age in happy days, Judah scarce past
thirty; but it is not always the years that count in Ludlow Street. Behind
that and the tenement stretched the endless days of suffering in their
Galician home, where the Jew was hated and despised as the one thrifty
trader of the country, tortured alike by drunken peasant and cruel noble
when they were not plotting murder against one another. With all their
little savings they had paid Judah's passage to the land where men were
free to labor, free to worship as their fathers did--a twice-blessed
country, surely--and he had gone, leaving Sarah, his wife, and their child
to wait for word that Judah was rich and expected them.

The wealth he found in Ludlow Street was all piled on his push-cart, and
his persecutors would have scorned it. A handful of carrots, a few
cabbages and beets, is not much to plan transatlantic voyages on; but what
with Sarah's eager letters and Judah's starving himself daily to save
every penny, he managed in two long years to scrape together the money for
the steamship ticket that set all the tongues wagging in his home village
when it came: Judah Kapelowitz had made his fortune in the far land, it
was plain to be seen. Sarah and the boy, now grown big enough to speak his
fat