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Excerpt from:
The Children Of The Poor
They thought he was killed, but he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his shining was at an end, and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere at some time to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly writing lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony peddling education cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with the prospect....