been made that there were too many "Ginnies" in the Gio
flat. There were four--about half as many as there were in some of the
other flats when the item of house rent was lessened for economic
reasons; but it covered the ground: the flat was too small for the Gios.
The appeal of the signora was unavailing. "You got-a three bambino," she
said to the housekeeper, "all four, lika me," counting the number on her
fingers. "I no putta me broder-in-law and me sister in the street-a.
Italian lika to be together."

The housekeeper was unmoved. "Humph!" she said, "to liken my kids to
them Dagos! Out they go." And they went.

Up on the third floor there was the French couple. It was another of the
contradictions of the alley that of this pair the man should have been a
typical, stolid German, she a mercurial Parisian, who at seventy sang
the "Marseillaise" with all the spirit of the Commune in her cracked
voice, and hated from the bottom of her patriotic soul the enemy with
whom the irony of fate had yoked her. However, she improved the
opportunity in truly French fashion. He was rheumatic, and most of the
time was tied to his chair. He had not worked for seven years. "He no
goode," she said, with a grimace, as her nimble fingers fashioned the
wares by the sale of which, from a basket, she supported them both. The
wares were dancing girls with tremendous limbs and very brief skirts of
tricolor gauze,--"ballerinas," in her vocabulary,--and monkeys with tin
hats, cunningly made to look like German soldiers. For these she taught
him to supply the decorations. It was his department, she reasoned; the
ballerinas were of her country and hers. _Parbleu!_ must one not work?
What then? Starve? Before her look and gesture the cripple quailed, and
twisted and rolled and pasted all day long, to his country's shame,
fuming with impotent rage.

"I wish the devil had you," he growled.

She regarded him maliciously, with head tilted on one side, as a bird
eyes a caterpillar it has speared.

"Hein!" she scoffed. "Du den, vat?"

He scowled. She was right; without her he was helpless. The judgment of
the alley was unimpeachable. They were and remained "the French couple."

[Illustration: The Mouth of the Alley.

_By permission of the Century Company._]

Cat Alley's reception of Madame Klotz at first was not cordial. It was
disposed to regard as a hostile act the circumstance that she kept a
special holiday, of which nothing was known excep