thought the time was drawing near, he stood before the glass brushing his thick, long beard, smoothing out his waistcoat and his Prince Albert, and adjusting his skull-cap to a rakish angle.

"Thou old profligate!" he sometimes said to his image, and the more he was pleased with its looks, the more he rated it. "Thou muddleheaded, vain, silly old yungatz! Wouldst be titivating thyself for the ladies!"

Till he saw his image grin at him from the glass, and then he went away intensely pleased with himself and with the whole world.

It was not only that a new joy, a new warmth, had crept into his dried bones, as might have been said regarding any old man in the circumstances; but it was Jerucham's first experience, in his long life, of personal contact with a gentlewoman, an American of education and breeding.

Perhaps many a time before, at family. gatherings and other like functions, Jerucham had found himself under the direct rays of beauty and youth, some of his own blood, some belonging to his friends. But they were as cold and as hard as the diamonds with which they were decked. They bore themselves with an aloofness, mispronounced "American," while it spelt nothing finer and nothing more elegant than a brutal disregard for all others not immediately necessary to the enjoyment of the moment, with a special emphasis upon age.

And so Joseph's mama was a sweet revelation, intoxicating in its sweetness. She was a breath from another and a better world-the world that Jerucham in his vast ramifications had dreamed of and sighed for without ever expecting to be there, nor a whiff nor a whisper from it to come to him.

One day she appeared at the basement unexpectedly. Joseph could not have announced her the day before, for she had not known it herself. She just stepped in now on the spur of the moment, just for a brief look, as she was on her way to an Eighth Avenue car.

Jerucham leaped up from his chair, all confusion and excitement.

"Oi-yoi-yoi!" he called out in short gasps as he essayed to limp forward, his figure doubled up, one hand pressing against the hip, the other seeking support from whatever was nearest. "Oi-yoi-yoi! Mein back und mein side! Bah!" he added, with a grin of self-derision, "old. old, no more, no more strongs left. Tink I'm liddle young boy, run, jump, everyt'ing! No go. No could. Old, old. Bah, old! Strongs all gone."

She insisted he should go to bed at once. To which he protested that it was nothing; it would all go away in a minute; that it was often so with him when he made a sudden move, and he always got better soon after.

But there was no gainsaying her. And she remained by the bedside, cheering him, and she was losing sixty cents, the price of two lessons.

"Gut to be sick," Jerucham observed gallantly. "I like sick all mein life, mit you sit und speak mit me. Lovely sick. You make me spoil. You gi' me sick every day."

"Oh, but where the mischief did you get this?" she presently exclaimed, observing for the first time a deep, crude tear at the lapel of his Prince Albert. "I must get a needle and thread and stitch it up for you."

"Ah," he moaned, smiling sadly, "you no can stitch him. God must stitch him —God, und no odder. No best doctor und no best angel voman can stitch him. Him 's deep, deep in dem heart. I make dem break in mein coat ven God He make dem break in mein heart. Every Jew make him so ven he belong' dead."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she said with deep reverence. "Was it somebody very near you?"

"Mein gran'son he was."

"What a pity! A young man, too. When did he die?"

"Ah," Jerucham sighed, passing his hand over his face, "badder, badder, a great big much badder like die! He no die. God no like me to make him die.

I get news dis morgen he marry mit a Krist voman. He marry mit her long vicks ago, und dey all 'fraid to tell me. But I hear it dis morgen, und I make mein coat so, like he vas dead, und it 's too badder for vy he 's no dead."

"Why," she returned, raising her head and looking up with eyes full of astonishment, the feeling of reverence in her having given place to one of curiosity, "is this really the way you Jews take it? Of course I'm awfully sorry for you, but really, really, it's so strange! We Christians don't seem to understand it. Why, I've got a sister of my own married to a Jew, and a fine fellow he is, too, and mother and we all of us are quite happy over it."

Jerucham stared at her in silence.

"You got sister in New York?" he presently asked with a quiet concern.

"No, it was n't in New York. We belong to Lebanon, in Pennsylvania. That's where my sister lives now."

"Lebanon!" Jerucham exclaimed with a start. "An epidemic, an epidemic, a regular epidemic there!" he muttered to himself in Yiddish. Then aloud to her: "Dat 's vere he do it-dat 's der place; dat 's vere he have dem big store, und he call' himself Mortimer. Mortimer he call' himself; ole name Markovitz no fit him, no gut for him. Mortimer!"

"Why-why-" she stammered, trembling all over, rising from her chair and staggering back, "that 's the very name -the very man! Gracious me!" she concluded to herself, "what can I say now to this poor dear old man?"

In a moment Jerucham had leaped off the bed.

her with both hands, and spitting in her direction. "Satan, thou old Menuvel, thou," he went on in Yiddish, "thinkest thou I would not know thee coming to me-oi-yoi-yoi! my side!-coming to me in the guise of a sweet angel woman to gain me over and reconcile me to becoming the progenitor of a race of Goyim! Tpui! tpui for thee, Satan! I've found. thee out! I defy thee, Satan! Tpui! tpui!"

She thought he had gone mad, and she tried to soothe him with some soft and tender caress.

"Avay-avay!

Get thee gone, get

thee gone, Satan!" he roared, holding up one of the big sacred tomes as a shield. "Ashes and smoke, smoke and ashes, thou shalt be this moment-oi-yoi-yoi! my back and my side! Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one! Ashes and smoke-"

There was a break in his voice as he beheld the tears of sympathy and despair in her beautiful eyes.

"No-no," he gasped, exhausted, addressing her in his English, "you no' him; no-I-I no verstand. Satan come here, I know- He do it all. He send you here. You go now, you go from me!" He waved her toward the door, his other hand over his face. "You go from me forever und ever, und mein heart he 's full mit breaks. All kinds of breaks in mein heart, und Satan he make 'em all. Go! go-o!"

And when she was gone, Jerucham shut himself in, and tore the tin-covered little roll of parchment off the door-post (the mezuzah), and sat down to examine the writing through a powerful microscope. There was bound to be a flaw in it somewhere when it was possible for Satan to get past it.

Our rickshaws had been trundling in and out of the mazes of little lanes and alleys just off the great trunk-road leading south from the Chien Men Gate. Captain Ho was the captain of the Peking police, educated at the American Mission College, Nanking University, who had learned Northern ways and had Northern military aspirations. He was a dapper little man, with a small, bristly mustache, and could not have weighed one hundred pounds. In his flannel suit and Panama hat he looked more like an under-secretary of the Shanghai Y. M. C. A. than a captain of police with a record for courage and quick thinking, and with four bullet wounds in his shoulders and thigh; but as he stepped nimbly out of his rickshaw the wind lifted his flannel coat slightly, and a gleam of metal from his hip pocket showed that, bland as he looked, he was still a believer in preparedness.

We were making a tour about what I may call, for lack of a better name, the social institutions of Peking, inspecting, in that intensely conservative Chinese city, the public institutions that bore witness to the very recently assumed responsibilities of an Oriental municipality.

"Of course you know what the Gate of Hope is?" said Captain Ho. We were waiting, over the customary tea and cigarettes, in a little room off the courtyard of the long, low, gray building, which was just like hundreds of other gray buildings throughout that part of the city, while the doorkeeper took our cards to the powers within.

"We call it the 'Evil to Good' institution, for it is here that women of the streets are brought from all over Peking, and it is here that they have a temporary home and refuge and a chance to live a better life. It is a very tiny institution for

such a large city. There are not a hundred women here, and I estimate that there are between four and five thousand women in Peking who have to register with the police as women of the town. This does not count the enormous numbers of 'little wives,' which is our euphonious name for concubines, many of whom are very young girls held in complete slavery in polygamous households.

"The line is hard to draw, but the professional women must register at police headquarters and be medically examined. The examination is perfunctory, but on the basis of the registration we arrange many marriages, and keep in close touch with any man living on a woman's earnings. We have a tax of from two dollars a month for women of what we call the first class down to twenty-five cents a month for women of the fourth class, and this is collected fortnightly on registration. Keeping track of them is simplified by the fact that the traffic is largely concentrated on eight streets not far from here and in about eight hundred houses on those streets, each of which pays a registration fee of from one dollar to eight dollars per month, according to its class. We watch the disorder in those houses very closely. I have often been stationed near them, and I remember one night on my rounds when I took eight girls from eight different beatings to the Gate of Hope. We usually have to take them, and often it is at the risk of our lives, for though they are beaten and ill used, they are property, and the men and women who control them are often willing to fight desperately rather than lose them. Very often we bring them straight from some terrible beating or ill usage, and by the morning after they more than likely want to go back again. Virtually none of them comes here of her own accord, because her courage has dwindled, and also because

well, the punishments for running away, you know, are very terrible indeed."

"Have you any ways of getting at the people who make the money out of the trade?" I asked.

"Not many," said my friend, lighting another cigarette. "It would interfere with too many prominent people." I thought I had heard that somewhere before. "For all our polygamy, it is one of the institutions of Chinese life. We can't all afford polygamy. We do what we can. Men have been strangled in our jail for violating girls under twelve, -we have a very strict law against it, and it is also a crime to live on a woman's immoral earnings."

We rose to greet the director, an astonishingly young man, simply dressed in the plain, dark-blue gown of the Chinese official classes. He was manifestly surprised to see a foreigner.

"You are the first foreign visitor he 's ever had here," translated Ho, "and he can't understand what interests you."

We went through a long passageway hung with mottos, in bold Chinese char

acters, containing invocations to virtue such as: "Industry brings content," "The tiger of passion will carry you at last to the jungle; bestride it not," and "Every woman loves a home; be grateful for this one."

Between them were schedules of routine work and study. One learned that there was ethical teaching on Friday afternoons, and that the rest of the week was divided between reading and writing (many of the women are of course illiterate), lace-making, machine-sewing, cooking, and housekeeping, spinning, weaving, and basket-making. Though there was no trace of Christian influence, Sunday was given over to "recreation."

We came out into a humming, buzzing, high-studded room where thirty or more. girls and women were sitting about and demonstrating to the eye the handicrafts of the schedule. The buzzing of tongues stopped at once, but the humming of the foreign sewing-machines went on with redoubled energy as these timid daughters of old China bent out of sight behind their work. Their quiet, smooth, almost expressionless faces bore little trace of their

tragic story, save here and there where a tiny undersized girl sat in a corner too weak to work, or scars and welts gave vivid testimony of past cruelty. Some of these infants of eight and nine had been little dancing-girls; others represented the toll of baby shame saved by the criminal courts from a fate worse than death.

"Where do they go from here?" I asked the young director.

"Most of them marry," he answered, eager to explain. "You see, a small fee places a girl here; then she supports herself by work. So it is not charity. Their pictures are open to the public. When a man sees a girl he likes, he sends his middleman, as in all other Chinese marriages, and we inquire fully into his character. If that is satisfactory, we allow them to see each other. And if she approves of him, he pays us a marriage fee of anywhere between five dollars and fifty dollars, and they are married. It does not end there, however. We are in close touch with the police force, and if we hear from them that he is maltreating her, back she comes again, and he has to account to us."

"Do you let men have them as 'little wives'?" I asked; but Ho refused to translate this.

"Yes, they do," he himself answered; "what can you expect? They come from very bad lives, and even this is a big improvement. The trouble is that many skinflints who would like to buy girls, but do not want to pay for them, induce them to run away and come here. Then after a respectable interval they appear as suitors and get them for their fourth or fifth wives at a nominal price. That is bad, very bad, and some people who love slander say that this institution is largely supported by such men. It is n't, and when we catch one of them, we give him the full extent of the law for fooling the police. There will always be such people."

"Has this institution anything to do with the Revolution?" I asked the director, and Ho and he both joined in telling me how, if it had n't been for the republic, it would n't have been founded.

"It is part of new China," said Ho,

"but we have no public opinion to help it. Not even the Christian missionaries know about it. But new men in the police department from the south are chiefly responsible for it. And they, like myself, received their early training at a mission college."

"Are the number of these women increasing?" I asked as we again got into our rickshaws at the gate.

"Oh, yes," Ho replied. "The thousands of students who have come back from Japan have brought with them habits which the average Chinese boy would never pick up at home in anything like the same extent. Most of the present members of parliament have studied in Japan, and although I'm an ardent Republican, and had two sons who went through the fighting round Hankow, I must confess that in this respect they 're not much better than the rest."

We were rolling out along the great stone-flagged road that runs toward the Temple of Agriculture.

"I'm taking you now," said Ho, "to see the Peking Municipal Prison, the finest prison in China. It is one of the really enlightened reforms of the past régime for which the Manchus received little credit. It handles the serious penal cases for the whole of Peking. Out of our population of somewhere near a million we usually have about five hundred prisoners, and many of them are first offenders. That 's less than one in two thousand, and considering the fact that criminals inevitably drift toward a capital, it's not at all a bad record."

We turned a corner of the city wall, and came in sight of a group of buildings arranged like the radiating spokes of a wheel, with a fine administration building near the center, the whole, with a few outbuildings, surrounded by a low wall. From a distance it looked flat and duncolored, like the Chinese fields around it, but going nearer, the first impression one received of the whole outfit was one of conspicuous efficiency and cleanliness.

The governor, a tall, grizzled Chinese of the older school, met us at the gate,