Tommaso was a brindle and white mongrel. Though he had never rescued a woman, a baby, or any other human, so far as I learned, from a violent death, I number him first among the dog heroes of my district. His master and mistress, Mr. and Mrs. Pasquali Dominic, were both natives of Italy. Meeting for the first time in New York they were married at the City Hall August 9, 1898. Twenty years, one week, and five days after this happy event I paid my first call on Tommaso. Crouched in one corner of the family’s basement kitchen-living-room-bedroom, he was trying not to watch too greedily the spoonfuls of thin porridge and the hunks of Italian bread being taken in alternate swallows by the five youngest of Mr. and Mrs. Dominic’s eighteen children. Being a gentleman as well as a hero he rose on my entrance. “Go way, Tommaso. Come in, lady; he don’t bite,” Mrs. Dominic greeted me. On my accepting an invitation to take a seat Tommaso returned to his corner, and did his best to show me respectful attention while keeping watch for his hoped-for share of the food—the licking of each child’s bowl, with a morsel of its bread. “He a good dog,” Mrs. Dominic assured me. “He take nothin’ ’less I tell ’im. Lucretia, why you scrape your bowl? Give it to Tommaso. Good Tommaso.” Like a gentleman Tommaso accepted the offered bowl as though unconscious that the lickings had been scraped out, and without remarking on the total absence of his share of Lucretia’s bread. In spite of the too evident joints of his back-bone and the prominence of his ribs he refused to give way to the cravings of his appetite. Day after day he sat among those children, watched them take food which might have been his had he been a hero of lesser caliber—made a snatch and fled to the fastnesses of crooked stairs and dark hallways surrounding him. Ah, Tommaso! I know what appetite suppression means. I know how it feels to watch other persons eat food of which you stand in need. I served as waitress in a fashionable hotel on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Jist dogs—both of us, Tommaso! CHAPTER XIX FAITH OF JUNGLE-MOTHERS “How did the war affect the tenement-dwellers?” That question has been asked me dozens of times. The happiest persons I met during the war were in the tenements. Also, I will add, the most unreasonably unhappy and discontented person I met during that period was in the tenements. Shortly after eight-thirty one sunshiny morning, with just enough nip in the air, I was hurrying along East Twenty-sixth Street sorting over a handful of complaints when a hand clutched my arm. Glancing up as I was brought to a halt my eyes stared into as discontented and unhappy a face as I had ever seen. “Where are you going?” the woman whose hand still clutched my shoulder demanded, and the movement of her lips breaking up the expression of discontent somewhat, I recognized one of the best known of American women novelists.