The Chevalier Celestin Tonella is a man of striking presence. He is large and heavy and has the erect bearing of a soldier. He has the dominant nose and the composed air of one accustomed to command. The time was when he stood well up in the army. His exact rank I never learned. His wife is a small, slender, gray-haired woman with the unmistakable stamp of the gentlewoman upon her, and she speaks a number of languages as well as having the deft-finger gift of making, painting, broidering and sewing, as is the way with Italian women of position. Of their story I know nothing, except that once she was in the patronage of a duchess and was at court, and he was also in favor with the high and mighty; but now they are running Nos. 141, 145 and 147 Houston Street for a living and are here in America with no plans for going back to Italy. How or why they came, who knows? So far as the interests of this work are concerned I do not care, and have introduced them in so personal a fashion only because they are so typical a family of better-class Italians emigrated to America. Last year the number of alien immigrants landed in the United States who were able to come in the cabin instead of in the steerage was 64,269 and the year previous 82,055. Of this number more than one third were Italians. In my personal acquaintance among Italians in New York there is a man who was formerly a priest in Rome and is now a saloon-keeper and banker on the East Side; another man who has four titles and an unenviable record in Genoa, Milan, Venice, Paris and Vienna, who owns three barber-shops up-town and two resorts in Elizabeth Street capitalized with the patrimony of a young gentlewoman of Udine who followed him to America when his family had cast him off and it was too hot for him to remain in Italy, France or Austria; a third man who is a banker not far from where we lived who is conducting a flourishing “padrone” business founded on funds which he abstracted while an official in Naples before that city was bankrupted by its rulers. There are three. I could give a number more, but those will suffice. The point in the whole consideration is that _the lower class Italians in this country continue to pay the respect and homage to those of their race who have been born to position, without regard to the changed and democratic conditions under which both gentleman and peasant are now living_.