to make the debts his own, and to pinch himself and
his family to pay them. More than once Karl and his family had to live
on dry bread in Cologne in order to keep the paper going. My Barbara
found out once in some way that Karl's wife and baby didn't have
enough to eat, and when she came home and told me we both cried
ourselves to sleep because of it."

"Could none of the comrades help them, Hans?"

"Ach, that was pretty hard, my boy, for Karl was very proud, and I
guess Jenny was prouder still. Barbara and I put our heads together
and says she: 'We must put some money in a letter and send it to him
somehow, in a way that he will never know where it came from, Hans.'
Karl knew my writing, but not Barbara's, so she wrote a little letter
and put in all the money she had saved up. 'This is from a loyal
comrade who knows that Doctor Marx and his family are in need of it,'
she wrote. Then we got a young comrade who was unknown to Karl and
Engels to deliver the letter to Karl just as he was leaving for his
office one morning.

"Barbara and I were very happy that day when we knew that Karl had
received the money, but bless your life I don't believe it did him any
good at all. He just gave it away."

"Gave away the money--that was giving away his children's
bread--almost. Did he do _that_?"

"Well, all I know is that I heard next day that Karl had visited that
same evening, a comrade who was sick and poor and in deep distress,
and that when he was leaving he had pressed money into the hand of the
comrade's wife, telling her to get some good food and wine for her
sick husband. And the amount of the money he gave her was exactly the
same as that we had sent to him in the morning.

"Karl was always so. He was the gentlest, kindest-hearted man I ever
knew in my life. He could suffer in silence himself, never
complaining, but he could not stand the sight of another's misery.
He'd stop anything he was doing and go out into the street to comfort
a crying child. Many and many a time have I seen him stop on the
street to watch the children at play, or to pick up some crying little
one in his great strong arms and comfort it against his breast. Never
could he keep pennies in his pocket; they all went to comfort the
children he met on the streets. Why, when he went to his office in the
mornings he would very often have from two to half a dozen children
clinging around him, strange children who had taken a fancy to him
because he