of
the thinker for the lower activity of action.'

The men of action pricked up their ears.

'The higher activity, you mean,' corrected Ostrovsky.

'Thought,' said Benjamin Tuch, 'has no value till it is translated
into action.'

'Exactly; you've got to work it up,' said Colonel Klopsky, who had
large ranching and mining interests out West, and, with his florid
personality, looked entirely out of place in these old haunts of his.

'_Schtuss_ (nonsense)!' said the poet disrespectfully. 'Acts are only
soldiers. Thought is the general.'

Witberg demurred. 'It isn't much use _thinking_ about playing the
violin, Pinchas.'

'My friend,' said the poet, 'the thinker in music is the man who
writes your solos. His thoughts exist whether you play them or
not--and independently of your false notes. But you performers are all
alike--I have no doubt the leading man who plays my Hamlet will
imagine his is the higher activity. But woe be to those fellows if
they change a syllable!'

'_Your_ Hamlet?' sneered Ostrovsky. 'Since when?'

'Since I re-created him for the modern world, without tinsel and
pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony;
since--even the cream of this tart is sour--since I carried him to and
fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the pouch of the
mother.'

'Then Iselmann did not produce it?' asked the Heathen Journalist, who
haunted the East Side for copy, and pronounced Pinchas 'Pin-cuss.'

'No, I changed his name to Eselmann, the Donkey-man. For I had hardly
read him ten lines before he brayed out, "Where is the Ghost?" "The
Ghost?" I said. "I have laid him. He cannot walk on the modern stage."
Eselmann tore his hair. "But it is for the Ghost I had him translated.
Our Yiddish audiences love a ghost." "They love your acting, too," I
replied witheringly. "But I am not here to consider the tastes of the
mob." Oh, I gave the Donkey-man a piece of my mind.'

'But he didn't take the piece!' jested Grunbitz, who in Poland had
been a _Badchan_ (marriage-jester), and was now a Zionist editor.

'Bah! These managers are all men-of-the-earth! Once, in my days of
obscurity, I was made to put a besom into the piece, and it swept all
my genius off the boards. Ah, the donkey-men! But I am glad Eselmann
gave me my "Hamlet" back, for before giving it to Goldwater I made it
even more subtle. No vulgar nonsense of fencing and poison at the
end--a pure mental tragedy, for in life the s