New York's earliest delicatessen shops. When they had saved
three thousand dollars they married and put into effect the plan
which had been their chief subject of conversation every day and
every evening for ten years-- they opened the ``delicatessen'' in
Avenue A, near Second Street. They lived in two back rooms; they
toiled early and late for twenty-three contented, cheerful years
--she in the shop when she was not doing the housework or caring
for the babies, he in the great clean cellar, where the cooking
and cabbage-cutting and pickling and spicing were done. And now,
owners of three houses that brought in eleven thousand a year
clear, they were about to retire. They had fixed on a place in
the Bronx, in the East Side, of course, with a big garden, where
every kind of gay flower and good vegetable could be grown, and
an arbor where there could be pinochle, beer and coffee on Sunday
afternoons. In a sentence, they were honorable and exemplary
members of that great mass of humanity which has the custody of
the present and the future of the race--those who live by the
sweat of their own brows or their own brains, and train their
children to do likewise, those who maintain the true ideals of
happiness and progress, those from whom spring all the workers
and all the leaders of thought and action.

They walked slowly up the Avenue, speaking to their neighbors,
pausing now and then for a joke or to pat a baby on the head,
until they were within two blocks of Tompkins Square. They
stopped before a five-story tenement, evidently the
dwelling-place of substantial, intelligent, self-respecting
artisans and their families, leading the natural life of busy
usefulness. In its first floor was a delicatessen-- the sign
read ``Schwartz and Heilig.'' Paul Brauner pointed with his long-