At first I treated it like something that was going
on in another country. But I had a good deal of uninvested money
and my resistance was slackening.
At last I succumbed
One of the men I met at Tevkin's was Volodsky, the old-time street
peddler, the man of the beautiful teeth whose push-cart had
adjoined mine in those gloomy days when I tried to sell goods in
the streets, and who had told me of the dower-money which his
sister had lent him for his journey to America.
I had not seen him since then--an interval of over twenty
years--and we recognized each other with some difficulty
The real-estate boom had found him eking out a wretched
livelihood by selling goods on the instalment plan. Most of his
business had been in the Italian quarter and he had learned to
speak Italian far more fluently than he had English. A short time
before I stumbled upon him at the Tevkins' he had built an
enormous block of high, brick apartment-houses in Harlem. He
had gone into the undertaking with only five thousand dollars of
his own, and before the houses were half completed he had sold
them all, pocketing an enormous profit.
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