very proud, and I guess Jenny was prouder still. Barbara and I put our heads together and says she: 'We must put some money in a letter and send it to him somehow, in a way that he will never know where it came from, Hans.' Karl knew my writing, but not Barbara's, so she wrote a little letter and put in all the money she had saved up. 'This is from a loyal comrade who knows that Doctor Marx and his family are in need of it,' she wrote. Then we got a young comrade who was unknown to Karl and Engels to deliver the letter to Karl just as he was leaving for his office one morning.

"Barbara and I were very happy that day when we knew that Karl had received the money, but bless your life I don't believe it did him any good at all. He just gave it away."

"Gave away the money—that was giving away his children's bread—almost. Did he do that?"

"Well, all I know is that I heard next day that Karl had visited that same evening, a comrade who was sick and poor and in deep distress, and that when he was leaving he had pressed money into the hand of the comrade's wife, telling her to get some good food and wine for her sick husband. And the amount of the money he gave her was exactly the same as that we had sent to him in the morning.

"Karl was always so. He was the gentlest, kindest-hearted man I ever knew in my life. He could suffer in silence himself, never complaining, but he could not stand the sight of another's misery. He'd stop anything he was doing and go out into the street to comfort a crying child. Many and many a time have I seen him stop on the street to watch the children at play, or to pick up some crying little one in his great strong arms and comfort it against his breast. Never could he keep pennies in his pocket; they all went to comfort the children he met on the streets. Why, when he went to his office in the mornings he would very often have from two to half a dozen children clinging around him, strange children who had taken a fancy to him because he smiled kindly at them and patted their heads.

"I heard nothing from Karl for quite a while after he went to Paris. We wondered, Barbara and I, why he did not write. Then, one day, about three months after he had gone to Paris, came a letter from London and we saw at once that it was in his handwriting. He'd been expelled from Paris again and compelled to leave the city within twenty-four hours, and he and his family were staying in cheap lodgings in Camberwell. He said that everything was going splendidly, but never a word did he say about the terrible poverty and hardship from which they were suffering.

V

"Well, a few months after that, I managed to get into trouble with the authorities at Cologne, along with a few other comrades. We heard that we were to be arrested and knew that we could expect no mercy. So Barbara and I talked things over and we decided to clear out at once, and go to London. We sold our few things to a good comrade, and with the money made our way at once to join Barbara's sister in Dean street. I never dreamed that we should find Karl living next door to us.

"But we did. Nobody told me about him—I suppose that nobody in our house knew who he was—but a few days after we arrived I saw him pass and ran out and called to him. My, he looked so thin and worn out that my heart ached! But he was glad to see me and grasped my hand with both of his. Karl could shake hands in a way that made you feel he loved you more than anybody else in all the world.

"In a little while he had told me enough for me to understand why he was so pale and thin. If it were not for hurting his feelings, I could have cried at the things he told me. He and the beautiful Jenny without food sometimes, and no bed to lie upon! And it seemed all the worse to me because I knew how well they had been reared, how they had been used to solid comfort and even luxury.

"But it was not from Karl that I learned the worst. He was always trying to hide the worst. Never did I hear of such a man as he was for turning things bright side upwards. But Conrad Schramm, who was related to Barbara—a sort of second cousin, I think—lodged in the same house with us. Schramm was the closest friend Karl and Jenny had in London then, and he told me things that made my heart bleed. Why, when a little baby was born to them, soon after they came to London, there was no money for a doctor, nor even to buy a cheap cradle for the little thing.

"For years that poverty continued. I used to see Karl pretty near every day until I fell and hurt my head and broke my leg in two places and was kept in the hospital many months. Barbara had to go out to work then, washing clothes for richer folks, and we couldn't offer to help dear old Karl as we would. So we just pretended that we didn't know anything about the poverty that was making him look so haggard and old. Karl would have died from the worry, I believe, if it had not been for the children. They kept him young and cheered him up. He might not have had anything but dry bread to eat for days, but he would come down the street laughing like a great big boy, a crowd of children tugging at his coat and crying 'Daddy Marx! Daddy Marx! Daddy Marx!' at the top of their little voices.

"He used to come and see me at the hospital sometimes. No matter how tired and worried he might be—and I could tell that pretty well by looking at his face when he didn't know that I was looking—he always was cheerful with me. He wanted to cheer me up, you see, so he told me all the encouraging news about the movement—though there wasn't very much that was encouraging—and then he would crack jokes and tell stories that made me laugh so loud that all the other patients in the room would get to laughing too.

"I told him one day about a little German lad in a bed at the lower end of the ward. Poor little chap, he had been operated on several times, but there was no hope. He was bound to die, the nurse told me. When I told Karl the tears came into his eyes and he kept on moaning, 'Poor little chap! So young! Poor little chap!' He went down and talked with him for an hour or more, and I could hear the boy's laughter ring through the long hospital ward. We'd never heard him laugh before, for no one ever came to see him, poor lonesome little fellow.

"Karl always used to spend some of his time with the little chap after that. He would bring books and read to him in his mother tongue, or tell him wonderful stories. The poor little chap was so happy to see him and always used to kiss 'Uncle Nick,' as Karl taught the boy to call him. And when the little fellow died, Karl wept just as though the lad had been his own kin, and insisted upon following him to the grave."

"Ah, that was great and noble, Hans! How he must have felt the great universal heart-ache!"

"I used to go to the German Communist Club to hear Karl lecture. That was years later, in the winter of 1856, I think. Karl had been staying away from the club for three or four years. He was sick of their faction fights, and disgusted with the hot-heads who were always crying for violent revolution. I saw him very often during the time that he kept away from the club, when Kinkel and Willich and other romantic middle-class men held sway there. Karl would say to me: 'Bah! It's all froth, Hans, every bit of it is froth. They cry out for revolution because the words seem big and impressive, but they mustn't be regarded seriously. Pop-gun revolutionists they are!'

"Well, as I was