KINGS IN ADVERSITY - Public Domain

About KINGS IN ADVERSITY - Public Domain

Almost within a stone’s throw of the antique structure that for a full century has been known to New Yorkers as St. Mark’s Church stands a mansion that has had, like Eden, its glory and its fall. Once it was the home of aristocracy and wealth. To-day it is an eating-place for those whose lot is poverty and whose faith is democratic.

At the moment at which our story opens, the rooms in which in the old days portly Knickerbockers indulged in stately feasts are crowded with picturesque waifs from the Old World, who have, for a variety of reasons, crossed the Atlantic to air their woes in a freer atmosphere than surrounded them at home. A table-d’hôte dinner, greasy, cheap, and plentiful, is the magnet that has drawn from the East Side many of its most daring spirits, men with great grievances and enormous appetites. While emphasizing the former and appeasing the latter, these men grow
loquacious and blow white clouds of cigarette smoke toward the ceilings; and the dinner nears its end.

It is with a group of four foreign malcontents that we must seat ourselves in spirit, for they have a mighty matter under discussion, and in their conversation lies the explanation of certain startling episodes that occurred in the metropolis last year, the details of which have not been made known hitherto either to the public or to the police.

“You feel sure, Posadowski,” a frowzy-headed, full-bearded man was saying in the purest Rexanian, a dialect spoken by only a few hundred East-siders, “you feel sure that you have the dates exactly as they should be?”