heard them. He did not envy them,
though he liked well enough to romp with the others. His was a sunny
temper, content with what came; besides, his supper was at stake, and
Paolo had a good appetite. They were in sober earnest, working for
dear life--Paolo and his mother.

"Pants" for the sweater in Stanton Street was what they were making;
little knickerbockers for boys of Paolo's own age. "Twelve pants for
ten cents," he said, counting on his fingers. The mother brought them
once a week--a big bundle which she carried home on her head--to have
the buttons put on, fourteen on each pair, the bottoms turned up, and
a ribbon sewed fast to the back seam inside. That was called
finishing. When work was brisk--and it was not always so since there
had been such frequent strikes in Stanton Street--they could together
make the rent money, and even more, as Paolo was learning and getting
a stronger grip on the needle week by week. The rent was six dollars a
month for a dingy basement room, in which it was twilight even on the
brightest days, and a dark little cubbyhole where it was always
midnight, and where there was just room for a bed of old boards, no
more. In there slept Paolo with his uncle; his mother made her bed on
the floor of the "kitchen," as they called it.

The three made the family. There used to be four; but one stormy night
in winter Paolo's father had not come home. The uncle came alone, and
the story he told made the poor home in the basement darker and
drearier for many a day than it had yet been. The two men worked
together for a padrone on the scows. They were in the crew that went
out that day to the dumping-ground, far outside the harbor. It was a
dangerous journey in a rough sea. The half-frozen Italians clung to
the great heaps like so many frightened flies, when the waves rose and
tossed the unwieldy scows about, bumping one against the other, though
they were strung out in a long row behind the tug, quite a distance
apart. One sea washed entirely over the last scow and nearly upset it.
When it floated even again, two of the crew were missing, one of them
Paolo's father. They had been washed away and lost, miles from shore.
No one ever saw them again.

The widow's tears flowed for her dead husband, whom she could not even
see laid in a grave which the priest had blessed. The good father
spoke to her of the sea as a vast God's acre, over which the storms
are forever chanting anthems in His praise to