ly, who occupied the last house on the
street, crept unnoticed to the shack of a Roman Catholic friend, a woman
who hid sixteen Jewish people under the straw of the hut in the fields
where she lived, in one room, with eight children and some pigs and
chickens. Hastily taking from a drawer a little bright-painted plaster
image of a wounded saint, this woman placed it over the door as a means
of averting suspicion. Her ruse was successful. "Are there Jews here?"
the officer called to her, half an hour afterward, as the mob came over
the fields to her house.

"No," said the woman.

"Open the door and let me see."

The woman flung open the door. But, as he was quite unsuspecting, the
officer glanced in only very casually; and it was in utter ignorance that
the rage of the mob went on over the fields, past the jammed little room
of breathless Jews.

As soon as the army withdrew from the town, Natalya and her family made
their way to America, where, they had been told, one had the right of
free belief and of free speech. Here they settled on the sixth floor of a
tenement on Monroe Street, on the East Side of New York. Nothing more
different from the open, silent country of the steppes could be conceived
than the place around them.

The vista of the New York street is flanked by high rows of dingy brick
tenements, fringed with jutting white iron fire-escapes, and hung with
bulging feather-beds and pillows, puffing from the windows. By day and by
night the sidewalks and roads are crowded with people,--bearded old men
with caps, bare-headed wigged women, beautiful young girls, half-dressed
babies swarming in the gutters, playing jacks. Push carts, lit at night
with flaring torches, line the pavements and make the whole thronged,
talking place an open market, stuck with signs and filled with
merchandise and barter. Everybody stays out of doors as much as possible.
In summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken
coops along the sidewalk; for, inside, the rooms are too often small and
stifling, some on inner courts close-hung with washing, some of them
practically closets, without any opening whatever to the outer air.

Many, many of Natalya's neighbors here are occupied in the garment
trade. According to the United States census of 1900, the men's clothing
made in factories in New York City amounted to nearly three times as much
as that manufactured in any other city in the United States. The women's