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Rh was to kill single-handed a Mongolian tiger or a Siberian bear.

And when, directly on the heel of such imaginative half -hours, he went for a stroll through the eastern part of the town, which housed many for eign factory workers, he felt a queer straining of sympathy and racial communion with the Finns and Letts who were returning from their work, and also with the red-faced, smiling Cantonese coolie who was smoking his long, purple-tasseled pipe in the doorway of his little laundry shop.

But—and this was most strange of all, since an old-fashioned Knownothingism was his political credo and since he was heartily in favor of a strict literacy test for European immigrants—he felt the greatest sympathy and, in a way, kinship at those moments for one Ivan Sborr, a man of unclassified Eastern European race who eked out a meager living by cobbling and who went on wicked, weekly drunks.

Ivan Sborr was a mild-eyed, timid man of huge physique who had once owed allegiance to the Tsar of all the Russias. Now he owed allegiance to anybody who looked in the least like an official. But during his periodic drunks he had been known