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A CORNER IN A NEW YORK ITALIAN ART STORE

Showing votive offerings in wax, which are hung in the Italian churches as an incentive to the Divine Being to heal the diseased member. The small figures in the center of the picture are for Christmas presents.

steel-factory, and the supply of Italian toilers with the pick and spade about equals the demand. In the central and southern portions of the State there are estimated to be 25,000 more, while in Albany, Troy, and Utica (with a specially large colony), and in the southern Hudson River towns, there is an additional total of 18,000.

The Italians of New England are quite generally engaged in factory work. Thus, the shoemakers go to Lynn, Haverhill, Brockton, and East Weymouth in Massachusetts; while the marble workers and stone-cutters throng to Quincy, Milford, and Bay View, and the silk workers to Lawrence and Fall River. The immigration to Massachusetts is more largely from Genoa and the north than is that centering in New York State, for the New England quarries draw hundreds of workmen directly from the marble hills of Massa-Carrara in Tuscany, while the silkmills of eastern Massachusetts attract the silk workers of Lucca and adjoining Tus

can towns. Boston has an Italian population of 25,000 and New Haven a colony of 12,000, while the factory towns of the Connecticut Valley-Hartford, Waterbury, Meriden, Danbury, Derby, and Ansonia-have each permanent settlements of from 1,000 to 4,000 persons. The New Jersey colonies at Hoboken, Hackensack, Passaic, Paterson, and Jersey City are growing rapidly. In the last-named place Italians occupy several important political positions, and their Fifth Ward Republican League has an enrollment of five hundred names. Here a police captain, the clerk of the City Hall, and a Justice of the Peace are Italians, while at Hoboken their race is represented by a health inspector, health commissioner, school commissioner, public works commissioner, assessor of taxes, and a commissioner of the police board. Here are a number of large Italian factories, while considerable real estate is held by the older residents. At Union Hill, West New York, and Homestead several thousand Italians are

employed in the silk-mills. The larger part of these people come from Piedmont and Lombardy, where silk-weaving is the principal industry. Skilled labor of this kind requires a considerable degree of training and adaptability, and there is undoubtedly more intellectual activity among New Jersey Italians than among those engaged in the Pennsylvania coalmines or on the railroads. Coming from northern Italy, they generally possess a common-school education, and their Iterary and argumentative tastes find expression in the newspapers which they publish at Paterson, Newark, and Jersey City.

Philadelphia is, after New York, the largest center of Italian population in this country. Some twelve thousand of these people occupy twenty blocks in the south ern part of the city between South Fifth and South Fifteenth Streets and along Christian, Fitzwater, and Bainbridge Streets. The total Italian population is estimated at 45,000. They sustain sixty-six mutual aid societies, and their chief organ is a daily newspaper, "Mastro Paolo." Other journals are, "La Liberta," "La Voce della Colonia," and "Il Vesivio," a rather volcanic sheet. Thirty miles southeast of Philadelphia, at Vineland, N. J., is a large settlement of thrifty Italian agriculturists, who several thousand acres devoted to vines and small fruit. It is sometimes wrongly assumed that our Italians prefer to settle

own

in the Eastern States and do not go far West. But Italians are numerous in Detroit, and at Denver there is a colony which sustains three Italian newspapers, while that at Pueblo publishes another. In Galveston and New Orleans are large bodies of these people, and California has an Italian population of fifty thousand, mainly devoted to grape and fruit raising. These last are chiefly North Italian vine-growers.

Of the Italians of Chicago we need not speak, for Miss Jane, Addams, of Hull House, has already pleaded their cause with ability. She says: "There are women's clubs in Chicago which study Italian history, read Dante, and go into the art of Italy, but fail to know that right at their doors is this very interesting colony of ten thousand South Italians, reproducing their country's habits and manners, carrying on their transplanted life with a great deal of charm and a great deal of beauty, and yet these women's clubs know nothing about them. These colonies are just as interesting, just as worth while making an effort to know, as is village life in Italy. We lack imagination. We change the color of our tablecloths and the shades of our candlesticks in order to get a variety in our social life, and yet here are these people full of color, charm, history, who with their new life would offer a genuine addition to our own life and give us a type of social endeavor and stimulus."

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THE MARIONETTE SHOW Here is given night after night a play that extends through an entire year. It is usually founded on some ancient tale of valor.

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W

On Being Abroad in Winter

By Oscar von Engeln

Illustrated with Photographs by the Author

HEN the first few snowflakes float downward in November late, we watch them strainedly; something seems to grip at our hearts. For then first we realize that winter has surely come; that for a long time, aye months, we must bid good-by to the fair summer weather. Before the advent of those white harbingers we walked in the idyllic days of Indian summer, hypocritically asserting, with an air of conviction, "This weather cannot last; to-morrow will be winter." Yet all the time our hearts belied us; deep in our breasts we exulted at every warm day, and lived each night through in the hope that the sun would rise again to-morrow from out those yellow mists wherein it and the earth had both disappeared in the evening. Yet, as week succeeded week, and ever the wind blew softly, even the brain grew sanguine, and the tongue said, "It will be a very late and mild winter." Perhaps, even, there was planned yet another all-day excursion afield, to breathe in full the lusty autumn odors.

And now-now snowflakes are falling. We stand at the window with inheld breath, while a few more slowly descend. Out of the west gray-black clouds have come; the wind is no longer a friend; his manner has a quality of disagreeableness, not of cold, which hurts us. In those moments we cast aside, utterly, all our summer dreams. And, after the first pang of such a parting, we turn and say to our fellows, oh, so blithely, "Hello! snow's

falling; won't those hills look fine all covered with white?" Thus deftly are we ever off with the old love and on with the new.

The herald flakes melt ere they have barely touched the ground. After a few brief seconds the sun again shines; the scene is the same, yet the view has changed, the world is different. The joy of life is now in futures; with the coming of those few crystals we date a new time. Some weak days of watery sunshine follow. Then

A night closes in after a gray all-day, and the twilight atmosphere is filled with a myriad flecks of white. A hush descends o'er the land; only the soft murmur of breathing snowflakes is heard. One by one, distant landmarks fade out. Already a thin veil is spread over the surface of earth, a winding sheet for the few lonely survivors of the plant relationship. The air temperature hovers between freezing and thawing. A puff of wind from the northeast; colder, and with it a gust of snow. A quiet again filled with heavy, straight-down-falling flakes. Then the wind rises, slowly at first, giving the flakes only a slight slant in their descent. As the night grows late, the hurrying. flakes fall ever faster, the wind roars and howls among the trees in crescendos, and again decreases to a minor wail. Anon a blast buffets its way with dull thuds as it sweeps past. The storm is at its height, and out in the darkness the flakes are being hurled into up-rearing drifts, only

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