t sorry for him. Armida had been a good servant, and had served me
well for nearly three years. Old Rosina, my housekeeper, had often
regretted that she had been compelled to leave to attend to her aged
mother. The latter, he told me, had died, and afterwards he had married
her. There is more romance and tragedy in the lives of the poor Italians
in London than London ever suspects. We are too apt to regard the
Italian as a bloodthirsty person given to the unlawful use of the knife,
whereas, as a whole, the Italian colony in London is a hard-working,
thrifty, and law-abiding one, very different, indeed, to those colonies
of aliens from Northern Europe, who are so continually bringing filth,
disease, and immorality into the East End, and are a useless incubus in
an already over-populated city.

He spoke so wistfully that his wife might see me once more that, having
nothing very particular to do that evening, and feeling a deep sympathy
for the poor fellow in his trouble, I resolved to accompany him to his
house and see whether I could not, in some slight manner, render him a
little help.

He thanked me profusely when I consented to go with him.

"Ah, signor padrone!" he said gratefully, "she will be so delighted. It
is so very good of you."

We hailed a hansom and drove across Westminster Bridge to the address he
gave--a gloomy back street off the York Road, one of those narrow, grimy
thoroughfares into which the sun never shines. Ah, how often do the poor
Italians, those children of the sun, pine and die when shut up in our
dismal, sordid streets! Dirt and squalor do not affect them; it is the
damp and cold and lack of sunshine that so very soon proves fatal.

A low-looking, evil-faced fellow opened the door to us and growled
acquaintance with Olinto, who, striking a match, ascended the worn,
carpetless stairs before me, apologizing for passing before me, and
saying in Italian--

"We live at the top, signore, because it is cheaper and the air is
better."

"Quite right," I said. "Quite right. Go on." And I thought I heard my
cab driving away.

It was a gloomy, forbidding, unlighted place into which I would
certainly have hesitated to enter had not my companion been my trusted
servant. I instinctively disliked the look of the fellow who had opened
the door. He was one of those hulking loafers of the peculiarly Lambeth
type. Yet the alien poor, I recollected, cannot choose where they shall
reside.

Contrary to m