Vigorous and often attractive maidens in orange and green skirts, with a wealth of black hair fluffed back from their foreheads, and yellow shawls and coral necklaces fastened about their necks; dark, somber-faced Italian men, a world of moods and passions sleeping in their shadowy eyes, decked out in bright Garibaldian shirts and soft slouch hats, their tight-fitting corduroy trousers drawn closely about their waists with a leather belt; quaint, cameo-like old men with earrings in their ears and hands like claws and faces seamed with the strongest and most sinister lines, and yet with eyes that flash with feeling or beam with tenderness; and old women, in all forms of color and clothing, who chatter and gesticulate and make the pavements resound with the excitement of their everyday bargaining. This, truly, in so far as New York is concerned, is the region of the love feud and the balcony. If you will stand at any of the cross-streets that lead east from Second Avenue you will obtain a splendid panorama of the latter feature, window after window ornamented with a red or green or orange iron balcony and hung, in the summertime, with an array of green vines and bright flower-pots that invariably suggests the love scene of Shakespeare’s famous play and the romantic love feeling of the south. Dark, poetic-looking Italians lean against doorjambs and open gateways and survey the surrounding neighborhood with an indolent and romantic eye. Plump Italian mothers gaze comfortably out of open windows, before which they sit and sew and watch their chubby little children romp and play in the streets. Fat, soft-voiced merchants, and active, graceful, song-singing Italian street venders ply their various vocations, the latter turning a wistful eye to every window, the former lolling contentedly in wooden chairs, the blessings of warmth and a little trade now and again being all that they require. And from out these windows and within these doors hang or lounge those same maidens, over whom many a bloody feud has been waged and for whom (for a glance of the eyes or the shrug of the shoulder) many of these moody-faced, somber-eyed, love-brooding Romeos have whipped out their glistening steel and buried it in the heart of a hated rival. Girls have been stabbed here, been followed and shot (I have seen it myself); petty love-conversations upon a street corner or in the adjacent park between two ardent lovers have been interrupted by the sudden appearance of a love frenzied Othello, who could see nothing for it but to end the misery of his unrequited affection by plunging his knife into the heart of his rival and into that of his fair but unresponsive sweetheart. They love and hate; and death is the solution of their difficulties--death and the silence of the grave. “She will not love me! Then she must die!”