64 Island gateway. "No, Buffalo isn't being swamped," he said. We want them, these husky men and women; we'll make Americans of them in short order, with our parks and our schools, and our policemen won't be too much overworked while they are learning the difference between liberty and license." So Buffalo has a great man-factory, in full operation; and her product, educated in her schools, soothed in her parks, beauty-fed all about her streets and in her art gallery, is of Uncle Sam's best sons in a generation. After all, and before all, this spirit of manhood that makes a city great is a God-inspired spirit. I found an outbreaking instance of this, but I had to dig hard to get the facts from the modest men of means who did a fine thing, and did it so quietly that their left hands hardly found it out. In the usual movement of business, the churches followed the residences" uptown," until fourteen of them had emigrated from the business district. There remained a certain Episcopal church-a really fine building, in the thick center of commercial affairs and it was doomed. To have all the neighborhood given over to trade seemed wrong to one well-to-do Presbyterian, wherefore he made a quiet suggestion to some of his friends, mostly not members of the threatened church. The result cost him $150,000 and his friends $100,000, with which the church was permanently and securely endowed. But there was a proviso--that a short service be held every week day at noon, providing a quick refuge for the tried soul, a resting-place for the weary brain, right in the heat and the heart of the business rush. The church stands there now, and does its beneficent work, no less a monument to the Creator than a memorial to the fine spirit of service that Christianity has caused thus to flower in the hearts of supposedly sordid men. There appeared another instance of service in connection with a business so vast as to require the services of some twelve hundred young women as clerks in its office. The unique building housing these workers is provided with filtered and washed air, cooled in summer and warmed in winter. A mutually run restaurant, a rest parlor, a piano, and many pleasant things about, together with the entire absence of patronage in this service to others, seemed to me to make especially pleasing the motto, stone-carved above a fountain, "Honest labor needs no master-simple justice needs no slaves." Hardly less impressive to me-a confessed "crank" in the crusade against the bill-board ugliness which is endeavoring selfishly to prevail in and about all American communities-is Buffalo's notable attitude as to obtrusive advertising signs. In many cities the billboard men have taken refuge in the "sacred" right of private property, and have defied regulation, restraint, and limitation. But Buffalo has a charter which gives her some unique rights of selfgovernment. Outraged by the "Gunning system" sky-scraper sign incursions, an ordinance was passed limiting signs to seven feet in height. Did the Gunning system accept? No; it defied the law. Able city officials have recently affirmed the rights of the people through all the courts, and while signs yet disagreeably pervade, Judge Lacombe's decision downs the double-deckers. An eminent physician and educator, himself completely opposed to certain movements fostered by the business men of Buffalo, spoke to me admiringly of these men, nevertheless. Said he, "Society here is exceedingly good; there are a great many cultivated and educated people, with almost an entire absence of what might be called 'the fast set.'" I think Buffalo can spare the latter, and glory in her deprivation! There are great things yet to be done for the public in Buffalo. Indeed, one of these great things concerns all America; for many experiences cause me to surmise that if one sat long enough in the so-called Union Station on Exchange Street in Buffalo, he would be certain to see, passing through, any particular friend from anywhere, in this real "exchange." But what an unpleasant wait it would be, in a dirty, inadequate, ill-managed, and utterly inexcusable place that was a nuisance in Pan-American times and is a positive scandal now! Maintained by a railway calling itself great, it is great only in its discomforts and dangers, and in its daily showing of how very poorly poor facilities can be handled, when those who must use them have prepaid their passage. The responsibility for the continuance of this vast impropriety is said to rest upon the people of Buffalo, who, while realizing that it hurts them to have such an entrance, and vigorously trying to rid themselves of grade crossings, have in some way failed in adequately dealing with the thirteen railways that enter the city. Some time, and soon, I hope, Buffalo will have a real Union Station which will unite facilities rather than annoyances, and which will be universally recognized to be architecturally fine as well as practically complete. But, aside from this somewhat large fly in the ointment, Buffalo has so many glories, and is an American city of such fine spirit and fine accomplishments, that many other communities may well turn to her as an example and an inspiration. Hail, Buffalo! A YOUNG CALABRIAN, WHO HAD BROUGHT BACK FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS FROM AMERICA, BUT WHO STILL USED THE MOST PRIMITIVE FARMING IMPLEMENTS WHENCE CAME THEY? BY HERBERT FRANCIS SHERWOOD W HENCE came they? Doubt less this question has framed itself in the minds of many persons as they have stood in front of the big immigration building on Ellis Island and watched the men, women, and chil-dren in their foreign dress pouring across the plaza from the barges, to be swallowed up by the wide portals of the stationthree thousand, four thousand, five thousand, in the course of a cycle of twentyfour hours. While looking upon the broad bosom of some majestically rolling river, one wonders if the source may never be drained. So one wonders on beholding the flow of this great human river. On May 31, last year, as I stood in the "new port" at Naples, the query framed itself in my mind. Before me moved a line of Italian men, women, and children, two thousand strong, dragging bundles after them. A United States hospital surgeon, officially protecting the health of America-really advising the steamship companies, in addition, who would be rejected at Ellis Island-was turning inside out the eyelids and running his hands through the hair of each as the line slowly passed him. The inspection card of each was duly stamped with the American consular seal, and one by one the procession of short, bronzed Sicilians and Calabrians filed out, the pamphlet-like Italian passport in hand. Whence came they? A few days later I was on the Palermo express bound for Calabria and Sicily. The sun had set behind the Vomero and the stolid walls of St. Elmo. As we rolled around the foot of the soft green and garnet slope of Vesuvius, through the orange groves and vineyards, the heavy perfume of blossoms drifted in through the open window. It was not yet so dark that one could not rejoice in the riot of color that contributes so much to the enchantment of Neapolitan scenery. In the foreground were the red of fields of poppies, the yellow-green of festoons of grape vines swinging between the trees, and the soft pink and gray of the villas and old houses. Behind this was the blue of the Gulf of Naples, which, on the horizon, was softened into the dreamy blue of the cloud-shapes of Capri and Sorrento. As one looked out upon the fields with their high walls, watered by the contents of wells drawn forth by crude wooden mechanisms operated by the stolid and omnipresent donkey, one understood why the Italians in America are so successful as growers of garden truck. The Italian, however weary he may be, is never-ending in his care of his piece of ground. He, his barefooted "signora," and their children are always occupied in the field, working with unflagging energy to make their slender patch" blossom as the rose." They, too, are artists, with an annual renaissance to their credit. Calabria's morning greeting was a characteristic picture of herself. On the left of the train were almost treeless hills, rocky as a New England hillside and deeply scored with dry, stony watercourses. On the right lay the Mediterranean with waters as many-hued as those of Capri, yellow, sea-green, blue, violet, purple. train was traveling through a lane bounded by Nature's barbed-wire fencing, the The |