When I first set out on my calls I provided myself with some small
silver, which I thought I might fitly give, at least to the children,
and in some of the first places I did this. But presently I began to
fancy an unseemliness in it, as if it were an indignity added to the
hardship of their lot, and to feel that unless I gave all my worldly
wealth to them I was in a manner mocking their misery. I could not give
everything, for then I should have had to come upon charity myself, and
so I mostly kept my little coins in my pocket; but when we mounted into
the court again from that cellar apartment and found an old, old woman
there, wrinkled and yellow, with twinkling eyes and a toothless smile,
waiting to see us, as if she were as curious in her way as we were in
ours, I was tempted. She said in her Yiddish, which the humorous boy
interpreted, that she was eighty years old, and she looked a hundred,
while she babbled unintelligibly but very cheerfully on. I gave her
a piece of twenty-five cents and she burst into a blessing, that I
should not have thought could be bought for money. We did not stay to
hear it out, but the boy did, and he followed to report it to me, with
a gleeful interest in its beneficent exaggerations. If it is fulfilled
I shall live to be a man of many and prosperous years, and I shall die
possessed of wealth that will endow a great many colleges and found a
score of libraries. I do not know whether the boy envied me or not,
but I wish I could have left that benediction to him, for I took a
great liking to him, his shrewd smile, his gay eyes, his promise of a
Hebrew nose, and his whole wise little visage. He said that he went to
school and studied reading, writing, geography and everything. All the
children we spoke to said that they went to school, and they were quick
and intelligent. They could mostly speak English, while most of their
elders knew only Yiddish.
The sound of this was around us on the street we issued into, and
which seemed from end to end a vast bazaar, where there was a great
deal of selling, whether there was much buying or not. The place is
humorously called the pig-market by the Christians, because everything
in the world but pork is to be found there. To me its activity was a
sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic
civilization. These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed upon
one another in their commerce, as if they could be enriched by selling
dear or buying cheap. So far as I could see they would only impoverish
each other more and more, but they trafficked as eagerly as if there
were wealth in every bargain. The sidewalks and the roadways were
thronged with peddlers and purchasers, and everywhere I saw splendid
types of that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the knowledge
of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in heathen darkness. There were
women with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent
as evening pools, and men with long beards of jetty black or silvery
white, and the noble profiles of their race. I said to myself that it
was among such throngs that Christ walked, it was from such people that
he chose his Disciples and his friends; but I looked in vain for him in
Hester street. Probably he was at that moment in Fifth Avenue.