know."

She talked on, and the upshot was that I formed a conception of political parties as of a kind of competing business companies whose specialty it was to make millions by ruling some big city, levying tribute on fallen women, thieves, and liquor-dealers, doing favors to friends and meting out punishment to foes. I learned also that District-Leader Leary owed his surname to a celebrated pair of diamond cuff-buttons, said to have cost him fifteen thousand dollars, from which he never was separated, and by the blaze of which he could be recognized at a distance. "Well, shall I speak to him about you?" she asked. I gave her an evasive answer

"Why, don't you want to have favors from a girl like me?" she laughed

I colored, whereupon she remarked, reflectively: "I don't blame you, either."

She never tired talking of our birthplace.

"Aren't you homesick?" she once demanded

"Not a bit," I answered, with bravado

"Then you have no heart. I have been away five times as long as you, yet I am homesick."

"Really?"

"Honest."

She was as repellent to me as the rest of her class. I could never bring myself to accept a cup of tea from her hands. And yet I could not help liking her spirit. She was truthful and affectionate. This and, above all, her yearning for our common birthplace appealed to me strongly. I was very much inclined to think that in spite of the horrible life she led she was a good girl. To hold this sort of opinion about a woman of her kind seemed to be an improper thing to do. I knew that according to the conventional idea concerning women of the street they were all the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. So I would tell myself that I must consider her, too, one of the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. But I did not. For I knew that at heart she was better than some of the most respectable people I had met. It was one of the astonishing discrepancies I had discovered in the world. Also, it was one of the things I had found to be totally different from what people usually thought they were. I was gradually realizing that the average man or woman was full of all sorts of false notions

CHAPTER IV I ENROLLED in a public evening school. I threw myself into my new studies with unbounded enthusiasm. After all, it was a matter of book-learning, something in which I felt at home. Some of my classmates had a much better practical acquaintance with English than I, but few of these could beast the mental training that my Talmud education had given me. As a consequence, I found things irksomely slow. Still, the teacher--a young East Side dude, hazel-eyed, apple-faced, and girlish of feature and voice--was a talkative fellow, with oratorical proclivities, and his garrulousness was of great value to me. He was of German descent and, as I subsequently learned from private conversations with him, his mother was American-born, like himself, so English was his mother-tongue in the full sense of the term. He would either address us wholly in that tongue, or intersperse it with interpretations in labored German, which, thanks to my native Yiddish, I had no difficulty in understanding. His name was Bender. At first I did not like him. Yet I would hang on his lips, striving to memorize every English word I could catch and watching intently, not only his enunciation, but also his gestures, manners, and mannerisms, and accepting it all as part and parcel of the American way of speaking Sign language, which was the chief means of communication in the early days of mankind, still holds its own. It retains sway over nations of the highest culture with tongues of unlimited wealth and variety. And the gestures of the various countries are as different as their spoken languages. The gesticulations and facial expressions with which an American will supplement his English are as distinctively American as those of a Frenchman are distinctively French. One can tell the nationality of a stranger by his gestures as readily as by his language. In a vague, general way I had become aware of this before, probably from contact with some American-born Jews whose gesticulations, when they spoke Yiddish, impressed me as utterly un-Yiddish. And so I studied Bender's gestures almost as closely as I did his words

Even the slight lisp in his "s" I accepted as part of the "real Yankee" utterance. Nor, indeed, was this unnatural, in view of the "th" sound, that stumbling-block of every foreigner, whom it must needs strike as a full-grown lisp. Bender spoke with a nasal twang which I am now inclined to think he paraded as an accessory to the over-dignified drawl he affected in the class-room. But then I had noticed this kind of twang in the delivery of other Americans as well, so, altogether, English impressed me as the language of a people afflicted with defective organs of speech. Or else it would seem to me that the Americans had normal organs of speech, but that they made special efforts to distort the "t" into a "th" and the "v" into a "w."

One of the things I discovered was the unsmiling smile. I often saw it on Bender and on other native Americans-- on the principal of the school, for instance, who was an Anglo-Saxon. In Russia, among the people I knew, at least, one either smiled or not. here I found a peculiar kind of smile that was not a smile. It would flash up into a lifeless flame and forthwith go out again, leaving the face cold and stiff. "They laugh with their teeth only," I would say to myself. But, of course, I saw "real smiles," too, on Americans, and I instinctively learned to discern the smile of mere politeness from the sort that came from one's heart. Nevertheless, one evening, when we were reading in our school-book that "Kate had a smile for everybody," and I saw that this was stated in praise of Kate, I had a disagreeable vision of a little girl going around the streets and grinning upon everybody she met

I abhorred the teacher for his girlish looks and affectations, but his twang and "th" made me literally pant with hatred. At the same time I strained every nerve to imitate him in these very sounds. It was a hard struggle, and when I had overcome all difficulties at last, and my girlish-looking teacher complimented me enthusiastically upon my 'thick" and "thin." my aversion for him suddenly thawed out

Two of my classmates were a grizzly, heavy-set man and his sixteen-year-old son, both trying to learn English after a long day's work. On one occasion, when it was the boy's turn to read and he said "bat" for "bath," the teacher bellowed, imperiously: "Stick out the tip of your tongue! This way."

The boy tried, and failed

"Oh, you have the brain of a horse!" his father said, impatiently, in Yiddish. "Let me try, Mr. Teacher." And screwing up his bewhiskered old face, he yelled, "Bat-t-t!" and then he shot out half an inch of thick red tongue

The teacher grinned, struggling with a more pronounced manifestation of his mirth

"His tongue missed the train," I jested, in Yiddish

One of the other pupils translated it into English, whereupon Bender's suppressed laughter broke loose, and I warmed to him still more.

Election Day was drawing near. The streets were alive with the banners, transparencies, window portraits of rival candidates, processions, fireworks, speeches. I heard scores of words from the political jargon of the country. I was continually asking questions, inquiring into the meaning of the things I saw or heard around me. Each day brought me new experiences, fresh impressions, keen sensations. An American day seemed to be far richer in substance than an Antomir year. I was in an everlasting flutter. I seemed to be panting for breath for the sheer speed with which I was rushing through life

What was the meaning of all this noise and excitement? Everybody I spoke to said it was "all humbug." People were making jokes at the expense of all politicians, irrespective of parties. "One is as bad as the other," I heard all around me. "They are all thieves." Argentine Rachael's conception of politics was clearly the conception of respectable people as well

Rejoicing of the Law is one of our great autumn holidays. It is a day of picturesque merrymaking and ceremony, when the stringent rule barring women out of a synagogue is relaxed. On that day, which was a short time before Election Day, I saw an East Side judge, a Gentile, at the synagogue of the Sons of Antomir. He was very short, and the high hat he wore gave him droll dignity. He went around the house of worship kissing babies in their mothers' arms and saying pleasant things to the worshipers. Every little while he would instinctively raise his hand to his high hat and then, reminding himself that one did not bare one's head in a synagogue, he would feverishly drop his hand again

This part of the scene was so utterly, so strikingly un-Russian that I watched it open-mouthed

"A great friend of the Jewish people, isn't he?" the worshiper who stood next to me remarked, archly

"He is simply in love with us," I chimed in, with a laugh, by way of showing off my understanding of things American. "It's Jewish votes he is after."

"Still, he's not a bad fellow," the man by my side remarked. "If you have a trial in his court he'll decide it in your favor."

"How is that?" I asked, perplexed. "And how about the other fellow? He can't decide in favor of both, can he?"

"There is no 'can't' in America," the man by my side returned, with a sage smile

I pondered the riddle until I saw light. "I know what you mean," I said. "He does favors only to those who vote for his party."

"You have hit it, upon my word! You're certainly no longer a green one."