My uncle from whom I had learned Italian went back to Italy, and I was left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate and went to school,--an “American” school. I gave my name and my age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March 5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents, how much will twenty-five yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents, then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be true or logical. But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed. Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and then obtained my minute allowance. For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have been. The colony life of the city’s immigrants is an attempt to continue the village traditions of the mother country. In our neighborhood there were hundreds of families that had come from the same part of Italy. On summer nights they gathered in groups on the sidewalks, the stoops, the courtyards, and talked and sang and dreamed. In winter the men and boys built Roman arches out of the snow. But gradually the families grew in size. The neighborhood became congested. A few families moved away. Ours was one of them. We began to be a part of the new mass instead of the old. The city with its tremendous machinery, its many demands, its constant calling, calling, began to take hold. What had been intimate, quaint, beautiful, ceased to appeal.