pered among the Americans, says wine is an abomination, and they who enter the land pay dearly if they carry wine.'"

I spoke to Luigi. In his slow, Southern dialect he told me of his simple, monotonous life. He had been a wood-cutter. Day after day, year after year, he had gone into the forest, returning with his invariable bundle of fagots. Once the thirty cents he had earned on the days he could work was a large sum. Now wife and children, though they all worked, seemed to lessen the meager family pittance. Prices had risen, work had grown harder, and the woods were no longer what they had been when Luigi's father plied the trade. The glorious news of America had been disquieting to one chained to the slow, stupid work of an Abruzzi wood-cutter.

"Pietro, my brother," confided Luigi, "is a miner in America. Yet he says in the letter,Luigi, I swear to you, in America under the earth is fairer than in Italy in the green woods. Down under the earth, digging the black coal, yet clear and beautiful, a city with men and mules and soft white lights, so that everything lets itself be seen.' At night up comes Pietro and washes himself and goes home to a home all his own, green and white, and a table with meat and fish and bread, and a wife, and a carpet and curtains and a machine to make music. Little Luigi, he who is named for me, Signor, goes to the school and reads like the school teacher himself. Pietro has everything: a pig, a cow, and a sewing-machine. And he is a union. Even the great lords who own the mines must come to Pietro and the union if they want the coal to be dug. And he is a voter, a Republican, and a Democrat, and a union. It is il paradiso, Signor Americano. Even Annetta, she says I must go. She will wait, she and the children, and in two, three years I come back."

A shadow passed over the peasant face. He pushed back his seat, walked towards the window, and gazed at the dismal, sullen night. The rain still fell. A huddled teamster, his bare feet incased in a gunnysack bag, drove his rattling wagon over the uneven stones. In the deep doorways of the ill-lighted stone houses clustered a ragged, swarming mass of wet,

foul miserables, starving outcasts of a vicious city. A shriveled hag holding a drenched infant stood in the rain to catch the rare pennies of shivering passers-by. I saw the broad hand of Luigi go to his blouse; then it halted, and Luigi, deterred perhaps by the rain, perhaps by his belief that he must land with thirty dollars, withheld his peasant's mite. He would save his penny for America.

I heard of another Italian hearing the call of America who threw his pennies into the ocean. He had embarked on the boat with thirteen cents in his pocket. "What are thirteen soldi?" thought Andrea Bevelacqua. "I shall make my pennies in America.”'

It was twenty-five years ago, long before the great Italian influx, that Bevelacqua, a youth of twenty, left for America. As a boy he had read the stirring tales of Fenimore Cooper, and so strong had been the fascination that he gave up a promising career at the bar to begin as a tenderfoot on a Western ranch. His success was immediate. He became a cattle dealer, and later, in Chicago, a successful merchant. His wife, a New England school-teacher, gradually acclimatized him; and as for his children, they were, from their birth, more American than the Americans.

"They wanted me to Anglicize my name to Drinkwater," Bevelacqua told me, “ but I said always, I am an Italian, and proud of it.' I loved America-yet longed often for Italy. In the long nights on the ranch, with nothing to do but look at the stars, I thought of our gay city streets, the bustling cafés, the cheerful music, the geniality of the people. Then, in tawdry, ready-made Chicago, with its telegraph poles and soap advertisements, I began to dream of our beautiful Italian country, of the relaxing sun, the gentle wind creeping among the vines, the big, onward sweep of the sea, little groups of simple, pious peasants, the tolling church bells, the quiet gossip of villagers. Once, at a Chamber of Commerce dinner, I simply could not touch the food because I longed for a meal of cheese and bread and wine on this very table, in this very garden of the Restaurant of the Thousand Towers.

"Well, here I am two days, and to

placently his toothless mouth opened, as with lean, scraggy hand he rubbed a lean, scraggy neck. "Ah, Signor, there is no land like America! True, the air is bad. It goes down, down, down, while in Italy it goes up, light, like a balloon. But for my benedetta cough I should be in America to-day.

"Signor mio," he went on, lapsing into a meridional dialect, "America is the land. How the people rush; how they come in the big cars and the big trains; how they crowd and laugh and on the streets make merry! Here all sleeps. If you go out, what is there to see? Old Caterina, perhaps, filling her jar at the well, or the boy bringing back the goats. What is that for a man who has lived in New York? There the streets are always awake. When you go out at night, there's something to see and to hear-car bells ringing, people shouting, lights and color. and music. Ah, that's the city!"

The old man's eulogy was cut off by the demonstrative cough which had banished him from America. He rubbed his blurred, watery eyes as though to drive away the picture of the blazing white road and gray stone walls and to conjure up again the towering tenements of New York.

"This village is dead," he declared. "I am the Mayor, and know. It was always dead, but now, since all go to America, it is a joy even to hear a dog bark. You cannot find husbands for your daughters. There's my daughter now, good and strong, but-would you believe me?—I cannot marry her. A man who hasn't a lira in his pocket wants a hundred dollars or he won't even look at a girl.

Do you wonder the girls dream of America?

"In your country money doesn't rot in your pockets. At any hour you can get to eat or to drink. You can wear good clothes. Always I had my white collar, and my good, clean suit, fresh from the store, and I shaved as clean as a priest. And I had my own bath-tub, with the water running out of a little pipe. Is that not better than going every minute to the village fountain?

"The doctor, he say, 'Lupi, your cough, it kill you. You die unless you go home.' And I say, 'Doctor, America is my home.' And that is the truth."

Many Italians who in the smoky, turgid cities of America dream of their beautiful native land find their home-coming a disappointment. They exult as the boat enters the wonderful Bay of Naples; their hearts beat with a quicker motion as on landing they see the familiar gesticulating, humorous mob of beggars, soldiers, fishermen, cabmen, and cake venders. Has all this moving spectacle continued during the gray years in that drab America? The shrill noises of a Latin street, the exuberant gayety of a Latin crowd, exhilarate and intoxicate. There is no life but in Italy.

Yet imperceptibly it comes over their consciousness that something of substance is lacking to their dreams. Italy is entrancing, life is easy even to slothfulness; the paupers, made princes in America, have everything-comfort, affluence, esteem, even adulation-and yet unrest fills them. America is in their blood. Their veins throb with the pulsations of the quick, hard, nervous transatlantic life.

Many years ago there landed in New York a young noble, impoverished by the revolution which made Italy a nation. At first he failed. He lost the few dollars he brought with him to the first engaging citizen of the American commonwealth whom he met. He starved for months, as many Italians have done since, in a vain attempt to secure pleasant work. Then he began to succeed. He labored as a hod-carrier, and on Sundays played the organ in an Italian mission. Then, giving up manual labor, he opened a school for Italian children. He wrote letters for Italians to friends at home. With a slowly accumulated capital he opened a little bank, sold steamship tickets, drew up contracts, and gradually acquired a competence, finally a small fortune. Then at last the dream for which he had scrimped so savagely came true. He returned to Italy and bought back his family estates.

The long lavender vines still trailed their aromatic branches over the lichencovered rocks; the gray fig trees curled their great leaves as always; the vine-clad hills still nestled at the foot of the gaunt, bare peaks. It was wonderful; it was his beautiful native land. Yet, though again among his own people, speaking

his own language, while in America he had no tongue, yet to America the heart of the old man called him. He sublet his estates, took the first steamer back, and returned to his dingy little bank, where morning and evening he still toils in the harness of a life's routine.

I

It

"Villa di Brooklyn, New York." stopped short. The gold letters on the dazzling white of the marble gate-post seemed strangely alien to the bright Italian sun. The house was solidly pretentious, with three stories instead of one. branched off into a vine-covered stucco pergola, leading to a garden of flowers and fountains, and about it all, screening the house and grounds, were massive iron gates that might have welcomed a king's carriage. "Villa di Brooklyn, New York."

The ancient gardener slowly unfastened the ponderous lock, and, cap in hand, smilingly invited me to enter.

"Favorisca, Cavallero, favorisca. May it please the Signore to enter. All who pass stop, as he, to marvel at our villa, for where in all the kingdom is a vista so magnificent?" With blunt finger he pointed at the cypress-dotted mountain, and then at the blue, sunlit waters of the Gulf of Salerno.

"The name, Signore? Ah, then the Signore is Americano, and has heard of our Cavaliero's city. Would that I too might see this Brooklyn ere my poor life ends! They say that it is greater than Amalfi, greater even than Sorrento, with a hundred hundred houses filled with happy men and women. And to think, Signore, that all that beautiful city, the streets, the stores, the churches, belong to our Signore Cavallero Rossi. It reads as a miracle.

"He was but a poor lad, Signore, a goatherd, here in our village, though now so rich. When he came back, he gave a thousand lire to the church, another thousand to the poor, and he built himself this villa, not to live in, mind you (he lives in the city in America which he bought), but just for the pride of it. (I thank you, Signore, the Signori Americani are generous, like princes.) All that I say is true, as the Signore can learn if he ask at the wine-shop."

In the little village tavern, where a sophisticated vino di Capri was sold at miraculously low prices, I heard the re

verberating echoes of the Cavallero's fame. From the lame letter-carrier, "all tattered and torn," to the barefooted youth just flowering out into a baker's apprentice, all, without exception, were excitedly happy to speak of the glorious apparition of Giuseppe Rossi, and to claim some con nection, however tenuous, with that most illustrious Signore. Fluent and eloquent were the gestures; "rico, multissimo rico, richissimo," the barren words which vainly strove to express his wealth. The wineshop statisticians did not descend to fig ures; yet it was evident that the opulent Rossi possessed more thousands than you or I could count on fingers and toes; was as rich, in fact, as the gracious King himself, who drove about in his golden carriage.

Later I learned about Rossi from a returned immigrant. At first Giuseppe had worked in a five-cent basement barber shop, shaving his fellow-countrymen. Somehow he saved out of his six dollars a week, and after a year, during which he acquired an amorphous English, he secured a job in an uptown barber shop at double his former wage. In a few years he had his own shop, where he hired cheap Italian barbers, until they learned enough English to ask for higher wages. His shop grew; the time came when a cashier was necessary. Giuseppe figured it out carefully. Was it cheaper to hire a girl or get married? In the spring the wavering thoughts of Giuseppe lightly turned to love. The expenditure was not great-one mercantile love letter, indited by a professional letter-writer, and a steamer ticket. A month later, strong, grateful Annetta, now Signora Giuseppe Rossi, smiled a welcome at the door of the barber shop.

The dowry of Annetta, if figured in money, was five hundred lire, but her best dowry was an indefatigable spirit and a large portion of luck. On the first anniversary of her coming, an old gentleman whom he had learned to shave in respectful silence offered to lease to Giuseppe the barber shop of a hotel. It was the opening wedge. Other barber shops followed; first two, then five, then ten. Next, an Italian bank, where steamship tickets were sold, money exchanged, labor supplied, and votes delivered. The years