Among the ignorant there is a strange readiness of belief that Christians, especially those of certain settlement schools, strive by spells and branding-marks to win the children of Hebrews from their faith.

It had seemed remarkable that a fear of that particular kind should exist; but one evening I met a Hebrew, excited and eager, who told me that he had seen with his own eyes the branding on a child who attended one of these schools, and he offered to take me to see it.

He led the way to a decrepit rear tenement in Orchard Street. Men and women were agitatedly huddled in the hallway and upon the shaky stair, and others were crowded into an ill-lit room where a tall man, broom-bearded and gauntly gaberdined , was bending over a little girl upon whose arm had been burned the letters “I O D E.”

”Jesus Omnium Dominus Est — Jesus is the Lord of all,” interpreted the old man, gutterally grim.

The little child, not too little to be proud of the attention it was exciting, again told the story of how a “black man” had met her in the hallway of the settlement school, and had seared the marks with a hot iron; and at that the room was filled anew with querulous Yiddish.

Yet the explanation was in the adjoining room, where a hot fired burned in a cooking-stove; for the door of the stove upon which was the word “M O D E L,” was the branding-iron. All of the word had been burned upon the child's arm except the “L” and the first three strokes of the “M.” The girls brother had pushed her against the stove, and had so frightened her with threats that she had feared to tell. With the stoicism of the poor, she had suffered in silence for a while; and then the mother, discovering the burn, had leaped at once to the conclusion that this was the dreaded branding of which she had often heard, and the neighborhood had been thrown into profound excitement.

To understand how remarkably it came about, print the letters “I O D E” on a piece of paper; lay the paper with the ink wet, against another, and you will see the four letters reversed; turn the slip around, as the brand would appear looking down upon it on the arm and you will read the letters in their order, “I O D E.”

Where all the continents pour their mingling human tides — in those thick populated parts where silent Greeks smoke their long-tubed water-pipes, where turbaned Hindus bend above their rugs, where Lithuanian and Pole, Armenian and Swiss, Austrian, Scandinavian, and Hun, throng together — there are many strange beliefs. And far down along the East River, where great bow-spirits stretch far over South Street, where there are casks and bales and endless rope and chain, you may hear, in ancient taverns nodding dreamily toward the water, marvelous tales from them that go down to the sea in ships, for these weather-beaten men retain belief in ancient sailors' lore.

Science cannot dispel superstition. From the view-point of the superstitious man, a wagon moving without horses, a message sent without wires, or a train propelled by an unseen current, adds to the miracle of it all.

When the wind drifts drearily in from the bay, when the storm shouts over the roofs of Poverty Hollow, when the calling wind echoes dismally in the hallways of Sunken Village and Battle Row and creeps disquietingly in and out of dusky corners, when the mist clings in ghostly fold about ships and houses, the heard of the superstitious man responds as it did when the wind roared through great forests, and the snow fell and the mist gathered and the glimmering moon shone white before the dawn of civilization.

Down in Mott Street, where gleaming lanterns swing from balconies, where the smell on incense is in the air, where joss-sticks burn and sallow-faced men bow before the figured idol, there is unquestioned belief in fiends and devils, in magic and in spells. The silent, watchful men seldom speak to you; those who know English are apt to shake their heads, and to do business in abbreviations, backed up by signs; but now and then one is found who, if his Eastern soul opens, will tell you strange tales of things unseen.