BY
OLIVE HARPER,
Author of “The Sociable Ghost,” “Letters From an American
Countess,” “A Desperate Chance,” “The Show Girl,” “When
We Were Twenty-One,” “A Daughter of the South,”
“Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl,” Etc.
Copyright, 1907, by
J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company.
New York:
J. S. OGILVIE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
57 Rose Street.
THE SHOEMAKER
PROLOGUE.
In one of the small side streets that end in the Bowery, on the East Side, is a row of small and dilapidated buildings, which once, in the early days of New York, were the dwellings of fashionable people, but which are now occupied by poor but industrious people. The majority of these houses have some small business carried on in the basement cellars.
The people who occupy the houses above the cellar stores or workshops are mostly of the poor but industrious Hebrews who toil early and late to build up a little business in this land of freedom, a business which is really and truly their own, to have and to hold without persecution or robbery.
The house where Morris Goldberg had found a shelter and a chance to show of what stuff he was made was, if possible, a little more disreputable in appearance than the others in that row, but to him, who had gone through the horrors of the Kishineff massacre, robbed of his all, save his wife and little daughter, it seemed a peaceful haven of delight.
The little destitute family had been assisted to start, in this humble location, by the noble and practical Benevolent Society of the Hebrews in New York, and, though a cellar whose only light came through grated windows or the opened cellar-doors, this seemed to him a palace. Was he not free from persecution? His good wife and little daughter and he were free, free. One must have been a Jew in Russia to know what freedom means.