In spring and in fall things brighten a little. Those are the seasons of processions and religious festivals. Almost every day then, and sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk banners, strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of twenty-four pieces, and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come the religious processions, when the little girls are taken to their first communion. Six sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight of a mighty temple or pavilion, all made of colored candles--not the dainty little pink trifles with rosy shades of perforated paper, that light our old lady's dining-table--but the great big candles of the Romish Church (a church which, you may remember, is much affected of the mob, especially in times of suffering, sickness, or death); mighty candles, six and eight feet tall, and as thick as your wrist, of red and blue and green and yellow, arranged in artistic combinations around a statue of the Virgin. From this splendid structure silken ribbons stream in all directions, and at the end of each ribbon is a little girl--generally a pretty little girl--in a white dress bedecked with green bows. And each little girl leads by the hand one smaller than herself, sometimes a toddler so tiny that you marvel that it can walk at all. Some of the little ones are bare-headed, but most of them wear the square head-cloth of the Italian peasant, such as their mothers and grandmothers wore in Italy. At each side of the girls marches an escort of proud parents, very much mixed up with the boys of the families, who generally appear in their usual street dress, some of them showing through it in conspicuous places. And before and behind them are bands and drum-corps, and societies with banners, and it is all a blare of martial music and primary colors the whole length of the street. [Illustration] But these are Mulberry Street's brief carnival seasons, and when their splendor is departed the block relapses into workaday dulness, and the procession that marches and counter-marches before Judge Phoenix and little sister in any one of the long hours between eight and twelve and one and six is something like this: [Illustration] UP. DOWN. Detective taking prisoner to Central Office. Chinaman. Messenger boy. Two house-painters. Two priests. Boy with basket. Jewish sweater, Boy with tin with coats on beer-pails on a his shoulder. stick. Carpenter. Another Chinaman. Drunken woman (a regular). Glass-put-in man. [Illustration] UP. DOWN.