r unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy
dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise--vegetables that had
seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one's way
through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and
sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were
strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more
crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the
sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house
steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and
in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates
were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp
basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers. In one noisome
cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of
eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud
to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul
occupation. But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and
eighty years. Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian
Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a
romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New
World of promise? And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting
rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a
flock bed not fit for a dog. And this was a woman's life.

Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads
and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games,
hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines
heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange
of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might
seem? Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers' signs
and doctors' signs--doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence
because they charged all they could get for their services--and thriving
pawnbrokers' shops. There were parish schools also--perhaps others; and
off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard
the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and
recitation. Nor were amusements lacking--notices of balls, dancing this
evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.

It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue