writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him, now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education, anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave, unchanging face. [Illustration: PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS' LETTER.] "Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?" The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look. "I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had forgotten his laugh. CHAPTER III. IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL If the sightseer finds less to engage his interest in Jewtown than in the Bend, outside of the clamoring crowds in the Chasir--the Pig-market--he will discover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.