ely.

Why an industry demanding so many delicate qualities--patience,
perfection of touch, and long practice--should represent a return barely
removed from starvation, no man has told us; but so the facts are, and
so they stand for every country of Europe where the work is known. In
Germany and Italy alike, the sewing-machine has found its way even to
the remotest village, manufacturers in the large towns finding it often
for their interest to send their work to points where the lowest rate
possible in cities seems to the simple people far beyond what they would
dream of asking. It is neither in attic nor basement that the Italian
worker runs her machine, but in the open doorway, or even the street
itself, sunshine pouring upon her, neighbors chatting in the pauses for
basting or other preparation, and the sense of human companionship and
interest never for an instant lost. For the Anglo-Saxon such methods are
alien to every instinct. For the Italian they are as natural as the
reverse would be unnatural; and thus, even with actual wage conditions
at the worst, the privations and suffering, which are as inevitable for
one as the other, are made bearable, and even sink out of sight almost.
They are very tangible facts, but they have had to mean something very
near starvation before the Italian turned his face toward America,--the
one point where, it is still believed, the worker can escape such fear.

It is hard for the searcher into these places to realize that suffering
in any form can have place under such sunshine, or with the apparent
joyousness of Italian life; and it is certain that this life holds a
compensation unknown to the North.

In Genoa, late in May, I paused in one of the old streets leading up
from the quays, where hundreds of sailors daily come and go, and where
one of the chief industries for women is the making of various forms of
sailor garments. Every doorway opening on the street held its
sewing-machine or the low table where cutters and basters were at work,
fingers and tongues flying in concert, and a babel of happy sound
issuing between the grand old walls of houses seven and eight stories
high, flowers in every window, many-colored garments waving from lines
stretched across the front, and, far above, a proud mother handing her
_bambino_ across for examination by her opposite neighbor, a very simple
operation where streets are but four or five feet wide.

Life here is reduced to its simplest