pect truth from a tradesman. Besides, only youth thinks.'

'That is well said,' approved Pinchas. 'He who is ever thinking never
grows old. I shall die young, like all whom the gods love. Waiter,
give Mr. Grunbitz a cup of chocolate.'

'Thank you--but I don't care for any.'

'You cannot refuse--you will pain Witberg,' said the poet simply.

In the great city around them men jumped on and off electric cars,
whizzed up and down lifts, hustled through lobbies, hulloed through
telephones, tore open telegrams, dictated to clacking typists, filled
life with sound and flurry, with the bustle of the markets and the
chink of the eternal dollar; while here, serenely smoking and sipping,
ruffled only by the breezes of argument, leisurely as the philosophers
in the colonnades of Athens, the talkers of the Ghetto, earnest as
their forefathers before the great folios of the Talmud, made an
Oriental oasis amid the simoom whirl of the Occident. And the Heathen
Journalist who had discovered it felt, as so often before, that here
alone in this arid, mushroom New York was antiquity, was restfulness,
was romanticism; here was the Latin Quarter of the city of the Goths.

Encouraged by the Master's good humour, young Mieses timidly exhibited
his new verses. Pinchas read the manuscript aloud to the confusion of
the blushing boy.

'But it is full of genius!' he cried in genuine astonishment. 'I might
have written it myself, except that it is so unequal--a mixture of
diamonds and paste, like all Hebrew literature.' He indicated with
flawless taste the good lines, not knowing they were one and all
unconscious reproductions from the English masterpieces Mieses had
borrowed from the library in the Educational Alliance. The acolytes
listened respectfully, and the beardless, blotchy-faced Mieses began
to take importance in their eyes and to betray the importance he held
in his own.

'Perhaps I, too, shall write a play one day,' he said. 'My "M," too,
makes "Master."'

'It may be that you are destined to wear my mantle,' said Pinchas
graciously.

Mieses looked involuntarily at the ill-fitting frock-coat.

Pinchas rose. 'And now, Mieses, you must give me a car-fare. I have to
go and talk to the manager about rehearsals. One must superintend the
actors one's self--these pumpkin-heads are capable of any crime, even
of altering one's best phrases.'

Radsikoff smiled. He had sat still in his corner, this most prolific
of Ghetto dramatists, h