ing for ten years--they opened the
"delicatessen" in Avenue A, near Second Street. They lived in two back
rooms; they toiled early and late for twenty-three contented, cheerful
years--she in the shop when she was not doing the housework or caring
for the babies, he in the great clean cellar, where the cooking and
cabbage-cutting and pickling and spicing were done. And now, owners of
three houses that brought in eleven thousand a year clear, they were
about to retire. They had fixed on a place in the Bronx, in the East
Side, of course, with a big garden, where every kind of gay flower and
good vegetable could be grown, and an arbor where there could be
pinochle, beer and coffee on Sunday afternoons. In a sentence, they
were honorable and exemplary members of that great mass of humanity
which has the custody of the present and the future of the race--those
who live by the sweat of their own brows or their own brains, and train
their children to do likewise, those who maintain the true ideals of
happiness and progress, those from whom spring all the workers and all
the leaders of thought and action.

They walked slowly up the Avenue, speaking to their neighbors, pausing
now and then for a joke or to pat a baby on the head, until they were
within two blocks of Tompkins Square. They stopped before a five-story
tenement, evidently the dwelling-place of substantial, intelligent,
self-respecting artisans and their families, leading the natural life
of busy usefulness. In its first floor was a delicatessen--the sign
read "Schwartz and Heilig." Paul Brauner pointed with his long-stemmed
pipe at the one show-window.

"Fine, isn't it? Beautiful!" he exclaimed in Low-German--they and
almost all their friends spoke Low-German, and used English only when
they could not avoid it.

The window certainly was well arranged. Only a merchant who knew his
business thoroughly--both his wares and his customers--could have thus
displayed cooked chickens, hams and tongues, the imported sausages and
fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars
of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables and fruits. The spectacle
was adroitly arranged to move the hungry to yearning, the filled to
regret, and the dyspeptic to rage and remorse. And behind the
show-window lay a shop whose shelves, counters and floor were clean as
toil could make and keep them, and whose air was saturated with the
most delicious odors.

Mrs. Brau