of intellect and ill-health—­the hue of a muddy pallor relieved by the flash of eyes and teeth.  Their shoulders stooped, their chests were narrow, their arms flabby.  They came in their hundreds to the hall at night.  It was square-shaped with a stage and galleries, for a jargon-company sometimes thrilled the Ghetto with tragedy and tickled it with farce.  Both species were playing to-night, and in jargon to boot.  In real life you always get your drama mixed, and the sock of comedy galls the buskin of tragedy.  It was an episode in the pitiful tussle of hunger and greed, yet its humors were grotesque enough.

Full as the Hall was, it was not crowded, for it was Friday night and a large contingent of strikers refused to desecrate the Sabbath by attending the meeting.  But these were the zealots—­Moses Ansell among them, for he, too, had struck.  Having been out of work already he had nothing to lose by augmenting the numerical importance of the agitation.  The moderately pious argued that there was no financial business to transact and attendance could hardly come under the denomination of work.  It was rather analogous to attendance at a lecture—­they would simply have to listen to speeches.  Besides it would be but a black Sabbath at home with a barren larder, and they had already been to synagogue.  Thus degenerates ancient piety in the stress of modern social problems.  Some of the men had not even changed their everyday face for their Sabbath countenance by washing it.  Some wore collars, and shiny threadbare garments of dignified origin, others were unaffectedly poverty-stricken with dingy shirt-cuffs peeping out of frayed sleeve edges and unhealthily colored scarfs folded complexly round their necks.  A minority belonged to the Free-thinking party, but the majority only availed themselves of Wolf’s services because they were indispensable.  For the moment he was the only possible leader, and they were sufficiently Jesuitic to use the Devil himself for good ends.

Though Wolf would not give up a Friday-night meeting—­especially valuable, as permitting of the attendance of tailors who had not yet struck—­Pinchas’s politic advice had not failed to make an impression.  Like so many reformers who have started with blatant atheism, he was beginning to see the insignificance of irreligious dissent as compared with the solution of the social problem, and Pinchas’s seed had fallen on ready soil.  As a labor-leader, pure and simple, he could count upon a far larger following than as a preacher of militant impiety.  He resolved to keep his atheism in the background for the future and devote himself to the enfranchisement of the body before tampering with the soul.  He was too proud ever to acknowledge his indebtedness to the poet’s suggestion, but he felt grateful to him all the same.