The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by driving them out into the street to earn money to buy him rum whenever he was not on the Island, which, happily, he was most of the time. I know I had a hand in sending him there nineteen times, more shame to the judge whom I finally had to threaten with public arraignment and the certainty of being made an accessory to wife-murder unless he found a way of keeping him there. He did then, and it was during his long term that the fellow died. What I started to say was that, when all was over and he out of the way, his widow came in and wanted our advice as to whether she ought to wear mourning earrings in his memory. Without rhyme or reason the two are associated in my mind, for they were as different as could be. The widow of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a brute. Mrs. Salvini was an Italian; her husband was a hard-working fellow who had the misfortune to be killed on the railway. The point of contact is in the earrings. The widow Salvini did wear mourning earrings, a little piece of crape draped over the gold bangles of her care-free girlhood, and it was not funny but infinitely touching. It just shows how little things do twist one's mind. Signor Salvini was one of a gang of trackmen employed by the New York Central Railroad. He was killed when they had been in America two years, and left his wife with two little children and one unborn. There was a Workmen's Compensation Law at the time under which she would have been entitled to recover a substantial sum, some $1800, upon proof that he was not himself grossly to blame, and suit was brought in her name; but before it came up the Court of Appeals declared the act unconstitutional. The railway offered her a hundred dollars, but Mrs. Salvini's lawyer refused, and the matter took its slow course through the courts. No doubt the company considered that the business had been properly dealt with. It is quite possible that its well-fed and entirely respectable directors went home from the meeting at which counsel made his report with an injured feeling of generosity unappreciated--they were not legally bound to do anything. In which they were right. Signor Salvini in life had belonged to a benefit society of good intentions but poor business ways. It had therefore become defunct at the time of his death. However, its members considered their moral obligations and pitied the widow. They were all poor workingmen, but they dug down into their pockets and raised two hundred dollars for the stricken family. When the undertaker and the cemetery and the other civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead were paid, there was left twenty dollars for the widow to begin life with anew.