whom the secrets of its
depths are revealed; but she thought of it only as the cruel
destroyer that had robbed her of her husband, and her tears fell
faster. Paolo cried, too: partly because his mother cried; partly, if
the truth must be told, because he was not to have a ride to the
cemetery in the splendid coach. Giuseppe Salvatore, in the corner
house, had never ceased talking of the ride he had when his father
died, the year before. Pietro and Jim went along, too, and rode all
the way behind the hearse with black plumes. It was a sore subject
with Paolo, for he was in school that day.

And then he and his mother dried their tears and went to work.
Henceforth there was to be little else for them. The luxury of grief
is not among the few luxuries which Mott Street tenements afford.
Paolo's life, after that, was lived mainly with the pants on his hard
bench in the rear tenement. His routine of work was varied by the
household duties, which he shared with his mother. There were the
meals to get, few and plain as they were. Paolo was the cook, and not
infrequently, when a building was being torn down in the neighborhood,
he furnished the fuel as well. Those were his off days, when he put
the needle away and foraged with the other children, dragging old
beams and carrying burdens far beyond his years.

The truant officer never found his way to Paolo's tenement to
discover that he could neither read nor write, and, what was more,
would probably never learn. It would have been of little use, for the
public schools thereabouts were crowded, and Paolo could not have got
into one of them if he had tried. The teacher from the Industrial
School, which he had attended for one brief season while his father
was alive, called at long intervals, and brought him once a plant,
which he set out in his mother's window-garden and nursed carefully
ever after. The "garden" was contained within an old starch box, which
had its place on the window-sill since the policeman had ordered the
fire-escape to be cleared. It was a kitchen-garden with vegetables,
and was almost all the green there was in the landscape. From one or
two other windows in the yard there peeped tufts of green; but of
trees there was none in sight--nothing but the bare clothes-poles with
their pulley-lines stretching from every window.

Beside the cemetery plot in the next block there was not an open spot
or breathing-place, certainly not a playground, within reach of th