There are 3,000 fewer Greeks in Chicago than there were a year ago. That number of brown and muscular men, with flashing black eyes and bristling mustaches, have gone back to fight the battles of Hellas 2against the Turks. Now that the wars against the Crescent and among the allies seem to be over, the warriors who went through the battles unwounded are beginning to come back.

Nine years ago there was a young Greek boy peddling fruit from a basket through the crowded quarters of the West Side. He was eager to learn English and some one sent him to the night school of the Y.M.C.A. There he quickly developed into a most ambitious pupil.

As he learned he kept on earning. Five years ago he was prepared both financially and mentally to enter the University of Illinois as a student in the agricultural department. In addition to doing the regular work of his course he found time to run a small restaurant near the campus and to win a place on an interstate oratorical team, having developed ability in the art of Demosthenes by taking part in the debates at the Y.M.C.A.

He finished the three year course at the university and later studied for a year in the agricultural department of Cornell and also at the Michigan agricultural college. He is now on his way to Germany to do some postgraduate work in forestry, after which he will choose between a professorship in the University of Athens and an important post in the agricultural department of the Greek government.

More and more the Greek colony is becoming a permanent feature of Chicago life. The original immigrants for the poor little villages and farms of the ancient peninsula were all men, strong, young and venturesome.

They came to America to make a quick fortune - and they came alone - planning to go back later and marry or live with their families in comfort under the soft blue skies of the fatherland on the proceeds of a few years of hard labor and pitiless thrift. But as they caught the American spirit and filled their lungs with the freer air of this country many have found themselves unable to settle down and live again under the old conditions. Each year a smaller percentage of Greek immigrants go back to their old home.

The number of men who are single or unaccompanied by their wives is still large in the colony. With a total population of perhaps 25,000, there are only about 1,500 Greek families and not more than 3,500 Greek women and girls.

But the leaders among the race say that most of these single men are working to get money to send for their wives and sweethearts. No more than ten or fifteen per cent of them will finally go back to Greece to live. They are gradually buying property here and establishing business houses which will tie them permanently to Chicago.

The original Greek immigrants almost all started as street venders of fruits and candies. Such a push cart peddler was Anton Geocaris, now the head of the Greek-American bank over at Blue Island Avenue and Halsted Street, the only exclusively Greek bank in the country. Another was P. S. Lambros, who gradually worked up until he became chief salesman for a wholesale fruit house on South Water street. He resigned that post to start the Greek Star, a weekly newspaper, published in Greek which is perhaps the leader among the publications of the nationality. Other weeklies are the Chicago Loxias and the Salonica.