ome to
the city some years before.

"The next day I visited a shop where hammered gold and silver, for
which Damascus is famous, was sold. With the permission of the
proprietor I went upstairs to the workroom. What I saw there I shall
never forget.

"I found myself in a long but very narrow room, dimly lighted by a few
dirty windows. In two long rows in front of two long tables sat fifty
or sixty little girls huddled so close together that they touched one
another. Each child was bent over the table and each held a little
hammer. She was tapping on a piece of metal. The tapping was
never-ending--a sharp clicking sound like the falling of hail. The
children never spoke nor smiled. Near me sat a little girl. She was
not more than eight years old. Her hammer had stopped tapping and her
eyes were closed. She was asleep. The girl next to her, evidently her
elder sister, seeing the foreman approach, pinched the child sharply.
She opened her eyes and dully began her tapping. As I left this room
of darkness my eyes were wet with tears.

"I found out that only little girls were employed in this industry:
that they began when eight or nine years old. When they were sixteen
they usually were dead from the metal that had entered their lungs.
The children were mostly Jewish, for you must know that when the Jews
become part of a slow Eastern civilization they sink yet lower and
become yet more phlegmatic and listless than the people among whom
they have settled. I was indignant and asked if nothing was being done
to remedy this terrible evil. Then I was told that there was one man
who was devoting his life to freeing these children. It was the Jewish
merchant who used the only electric light in Damascus. He gave every
cent he earned to this work. He maintained an industrial school for
Jewish children and was trying to interest the Jews of the world in
the movement. And then I blessed this man's electric light. I think of
him always as 'The Light of Damascus.'"

* * * * *

AND thus Sholom Asch talked. I cannot reproduce his words; I have only
tried to give the spirit of them. He talked in the finished style of a
Maupassant, with all the imagination and all the strength of that
great master. I saw then, before I had read his work, that his title
of "The Jewish Maupassant" was not extravagant. And I saw also that
here was an artist with human sympathy immeasurable, and yet not
lacking sensuous image