laby, while the old granny listened eagerly,
her elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay pipe, blackened with age,
between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not
the cold draught from without, in which they shivered; she looked far
over the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.

"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
beato--"

The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under
southern, cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend," in Mulberry
Street, and the wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in
the language of their new home, the land of the free: "Less music!
More work! Root, hog, or die!"

Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pigtail.
It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even
the north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as
he disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar steps. Down
there, where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men
were bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in
the game, every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake.
The one blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a
mat in a corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other
held over a little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something
fluttered in the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker
took a long draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his
couch in senseless content.

Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand,
to the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the
tenements of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not
more galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain--the slavery
of the pipe. Four, eight, sixteen, twenty odd such "homes" in this
tenement, disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage
and troth are not in the bargain.

In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam
works its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smokin