and were strictly intent on their own affairs.  No part of the town is more crowded or more industrious.  If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows.  The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on.  In the damp basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers.  In one noisome cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul occupation.  But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and eighty years.  Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New World of promise?  And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a flock bed not fit for a dog.  And this was a woman’s life.

Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games, hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange of rough or kindly banter.  Was it altogether so melancholy as it might seem?  Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers’ signs and doctors’ signs—­doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence because they charged all they could get for their services—­and thriving pawnbrokers’ shops.  There were parish schools also—­perhaps others; and off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and recitation.  Nor were amusements lacking—­notices of balls, dancing this evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.

It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the sun had some quality in its shining.  The children and the caged birds at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there above the traffic and the clamor.  Turning down a narrow alley, with a gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person.  Here an Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as merrily as if it were the grape harvest.  A woman opened a lower room door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom