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But neither poverty nor abuse have power to discourage the child of Italy; for though he be born to the succession of the White House, if fate and the genius of politics so will it, he is in looks, in temper, and in speech, when among his own, as much an Italian as his father, who could not even hold real estate if there were any chance of his getting any. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after-years. Only the prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment. While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story in the school, a characteristic group appeared on the stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They had been arrested "fur fightin','' she briefly explained as she dragged them by the collar toward the principal, who just then came out to inquire the cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. 'The three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured party.

"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of Mott Street, with a slight touch of "the Bend" The aggressor, a heavy-browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty -- school had only just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection -- that he was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.

Perhaps of all the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the course of years -- and they are many and sad, most of them -- none comes nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than that of my little friend Pietro of whom I spoke, exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I met him first in the Mulberry Street police station, where he was interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, lie seemed to fit in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of the police station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but for his maimed hand and his oddly grave, yet eager face, which no smile ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers. There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it: "2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 mother," subsisting on an unsteady maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking -- always the earnings of one week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that still preserve to Jersey Street the memorv of its former bad eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came home from school and, putting his books away on the shelf for the next in order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was fairly upon him, and then it was too late.

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. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his fourteen months' old baby brother, who was beginning to walk and could almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education, anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave, unchanging face,