business with a capital of twenty-five dollars in his pocket. And with one-fifth of this capital he buys a secondhand pushcart from his Greek neighbour, wends his way with it to the marketplace, makes a purchase there of a few boxes of oranges, sorts them in his cart into three classes—“there is no equality in nature,” he says, while doing this—sticks a price card at the head of each class, and starts, in the name of Allah, his business. That is how he will keep in the open air twelve hours a day.
But in the district where he is known he does not long remain. The sympathy of his compatriots is to him worse than the doctor’s medicines, and those who had often heard him speechifying exchanged significant looks when he passed.
Moreover, the police would not let him set up his stand anywhere. “There comes the pushcart orator,” they would say to each other; and before our poor Syrian stops to breathe, one of them grumpishly cries out, “Move on there! Move on!”
Once Khalid ventures to ask, “But why are others allowed to set up their stands here?” And the “copper” (we beg the Critic’s pardon again) coming forward twirling his club, lays his hand on Khalid’s shoulder and calmly this: “Don’t you think I know you? Move on, I say.”
O Khalid, have you forgotten that these “coppers” are the minions of Tammany? Why tarry, therefore, and ask questions? Yes, make a big move at once—out of the district entirely.
Now, to the East Side, into the Jewish Quarter, Khalid directs his cart. And there, he falls in with Jewish fellow pushcart peddlers and puts up with them in a cellar similar to his in the Syrian Quarter.
But only for a month could he suffer what the Jew has suffered for centuries. Why? There is this difference between the cellar of the Semite Syrian and that of the Semite Jew: