later, in the winter of 1856, I think. Karl had been staying
away from the club for three or four years. He was sick of their
faction fights, and disgusted with the hot-heads who were always
crying for violent revolution. I saw him very often during the time
that he kept away from the club, when Kinkel and Willich and other
romantic middle-class men held sway there. Karl would say to me: 'Bah!
It's all froth, Hans, every bit of it is froth. They cry out for
revolution because the words seem big and impressive, but they mustn't
be regarded seriously. Pop-gun revolutionists they are!'

"Well, as I was saying, I heard the lectures on political economy
which Karl gave at the club along in fifty-six and fifty-seven. He
lectured to us just as he talked to the juries, quietly and
slowly--like a teacher. Then he would ask us questions to find out how
much we knew, and the man who showed that he had not been listening
carefully got a scolding. Karl would look right at him and say: 'And
did you _really_ listen to the lecture, Comrade So-and-So?' A fine
teacher he was.

"I think that Karl's affairs improved a bit just them. Engels used to
help him, too. At any rate, he and his family moved out into the
suburbs and I did not see him so often. My family had grown large by
that time, and I had to drop agitation for a few years to feed and
clothe my little ones. But I used to visit Karl sometimes on Sundays,
and then we'd talk over all that had happened in connection with the
movement. I used to take him the best cigars I could get, and he
always relished them.

"For Karl was a great smoker. Nearly always he had a cigar in his
mouth, and, ugh!--what nasty things he had to smoke. We used to call
his cigars 'Marx's rope-ends,' and they were as bad as their name.
That the terrible things he had to smoke, because they were cheap,
injured his health there can be no doubt at all. I used to say that it
was helping the movement to take him a box of decent cigars, for it
was surely saving him from smoking old rope-ends.'

"Poor Jenny! She was so grateful whenever I brought Karl a box of
cigars. 'So long as he must smoke, friend Fritzsche, it is better that
he should have something decent to smoke. The cheap trash he smokes is
bad for him, I'm sure.' She knew, poor thing, that the poverty he
endured for the great Cause was killing Karl by inches, as you might
say. And I knew it, too, laddie, and it made my heart bleed."

"Ah, he was a ma