r. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.

The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe's parents, they would answer
no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
curiosity:

"Are youse goin' to give us any money?" Poor Giuseppe!

My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
course of years--and they are many and sad, most of them--none comes
nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
"2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder," subsisting on an unsteady
maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the
Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earne