w streets near by, and to look up from the bulkheads
at the sailors working in the rigging, and the 'long-shoremen rolling
the casks on board, or lowering great square boxes into the holds.

He would have liked, could he have had his way, to live so for the rest
of his life; but they would not let him have his way, and coaxed him on
a ship to go to the New World to meet his uncle. He was not a real
uncle, but only a make-believe one, to satisfy those who objected to
assisted immigrants, and who wished to be assured against having to
support Guido, and others like him. But they were not half so anxious to
keep Guido at home as he himself was to stay there.

The new uncle met him at Ellis Island, and embraced him affectionately,
and put him in an express wagon, and drove him with a great many more of
his countrymen to where Mulberry Street makes a bend and joins Hester.
And in the Bend Guido found thousands of his fellows sleeping twenty in
a room and over-crowded into the street: some who had but just arrived,
and others who had already learned to swear in English, and had their
street-cleaning badges and their peddler's licenses, to show that they
had not been overlooked by the kindly society of Tammany, which sees
that no free and independent voter shall go unrewarded.

New York affected Guido like a bad dream. It was cold and muddy, and
the snow when it fell turned to mud so quickly that Guido believed they
were one and the same. He did not dare to think of the place he know as
home. And the sight of the colored advertisements of the steamship lines
that hung in the windows of the Italian bankers hurt him as the sound of
traffic on the street cuts to the heart of a prisoner in the Tombs. Many
of his countrymen bade good-by to Mulberry Street and sailed away; but
they had grown rich through obeying the padrones, and working night and
morning sweeping the Avenue uptown, and by living on the refuse from the
scows at Canal Street. Guido never hoped to grow rich, and no one
stopped to buy his uncle's wares.

The electric lights came out, and still the crowd passed and thronged
before him, and the snow fell and left no mark on the white figures.
Guido was growing cold, and the bustle of the hurrying hundreds which
had entertained him earlier in the day had ceased to interest him, and
his amusement had given place to the fear that no one of them would ever
stop, and that he would return to his uncle empty-handed. He was hu