"For God's sake, Kessler! If you cannot read and write why did you accept the nomination for the secretaryship?" the organizer asked angrily. But Kessler was defiant.
"Well, how and from where did you want me to know that a secretary must know to read and write?"
Kessler's resignation and the election of a new secretary brought the organization on the brink of ruin. And if it would not have been for the superior generalship of organizer Kirshen the Pretzel-Painters' Union would have been crushed under the heel of capitalism.
THE GYPSY BLOOD THAT TELLS
One does not expect to meet anything out of the ordinary at West Farms to break the monotony where the big city fringes out. The old wooden shacks lean on the brick tenements, and one does not know whether the city invades the peaceful country or the country tries to catch up with the city. The outskirts of New York always brings to me the memory of a certain gentleman in silk hat and dress suit, but with the ends of his trousers in fringes and his shoes down at the heel. But—as a wise man once said—if one stands in one place long enough he sees the whole world pass before him as in a kaleidoscope. Thus also my frequent visits to West Farms were repaid when I saw one morning a gypsy tribe camped there.
Six wagons back of the road, a dozen horses neighing as they rubbed their noses on the shafts; a few tents with the flaps undulating windward; a few patches of color on the dress of the women. What a change it made in the dreary place, how stolid old West Farms was transformed when the curling smoke rose from the stovepipes of the camp wagons!
I expected to hear the usual noise attending camping; song and laughter, as only gypsies can sing and laugh.
It was a Roumanian gypsy tribe; one of many that have come over to this country in the last decade. But the people went about in the quietest possible way, which I knew was not at all their custom.
"Have they taken on manners?" I wondered.