_Thrift._ The Italian is frugal and thrifty. Most of them seem to have money. A poor woman exclaimed at one of our free Saturday night concerts some time ago, “O Signore, some one has robbed me.” I looked at her and thought to myself, “She is so poorly dressed I do not believe she has lost much,” but I said, “Come and see me after the concert.” On talking with her I found that the thief had been better informed than I, for he had cut the skirt of her dress with a knife and had taken $80 which was in an inside pocket. It is no unusual sight for a laborer to draw from his wallet a roll of bills amounting to $50 or more to pay for a ten cent spelling book in our night school. The amount of real estate the Italians own in New York is very large; some years ago it was estimated at over sixty millions. It is probably more than double that today. Some of them own tenements and rent rooms that are slept in by day by one shift of men and at night by another. One must be careful that he is not an innocent party to placing children in orphan asylums and other such homes to be educated at the public’s expense when the family is entirely able to support its own children. An Italian woman wished me to place her two boys in “college.” By “college” she meant an orphan asylum. When I investigated I found that she was married, had a husband who was in perfect health, and was herself worth between three and four thousand dollars. The church receives very little financial support from these people, although they are lavish enough when it comes to a big display at a wedding, a christening, or a funeral. The money paid for bands to walk before the hearse must amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in the Italian colony of New York City. _How They Are Misused._ There is no question but that the Italian earns the money that is paid him in America; no better laborers ever came to these shores, and the way they are sometimes misused is shameful. I saw once a pitiful exhibition of this. It was an August day, one of the most intensely hot I had ever experienced, and all the worse because it was in a long succession of stifling days and nights. Everywhere men were stopping their horses and cooling them off with the hose, or with pails of water and, despite it all, dead horses were lying in all the principal thoroughfares. An Irish boss was foreman of a gang of Italians that was asphalting a city street. A line was drawn down the middle of the street and the force divided, each gang taking the part on either side of the line from the middle of the street to the curb. The gang that asphalted their half of the block first would receive as reward a keg of beer that stood perched, temptingly, on an elevated platform at the end of the street. I do not remember ever seeing elsewhere human beings driven at such inhuman speed; it was a cruel proof of what greed and a total disregard of the welfare of the poor immigrants could furnish.