Frier of Pepper Pods, Mulberry’s queen of gossips. CHAPTER III A SPOT OF YELLOW PAINT NEXT morning, while the sun gave its first touch to the bronze head of Garibaldi, Bertino tied on an apron and set to work in Signor Di Bello’s shop, that peerless grocery whose small window and large door look tranquilly on the Park of Paradise. For a dozen years it had been known far and wide among Italia’s children as “The Sign of the Wooden Bunch.” The nickname came of a piece of carved oak simulating a bunch of bananas that hung before the door. In the early days of his business life the padrone had learned that the air of Mulberry was singularly fatal to the real fruit that he put on show outside. It happened some days that as many as twenty bananas on one stem would evaporate, though all the others remained intact. It was always the ones nearest the ground that vanished. One evening it struck Signor Di Bello that a violent chemical change in the exposed fruit would put an end to its mysterious disintegration. So he substituted the bananas of art for those of Nature. The evaporation ceased straightway, but for two or three mornings thereafter certain small boys, on their way to the Five Points Mission School, beheld with bitter disappointment the oaken symbol, and answered its grin of mockery with looks of blackest disgust. Those boys are workingmen now, and when they dream of the springtimes of childhood, they see Giorgio Di Bello, paint brush in hand, giving a fresh skin of yellow to the make-believe bananas. It was a promise of vernal roses as sure as the chirp of a bluebird in the churchyard grass or the gladsome advent of Simone the Sardinian with his hokey-pokey cart. When the people saw him giving the bunch its annual sprucing up, they were wont to exclaim: “Bravo! Summer is coming. Soon we shall have music in Paradise.” The morning of Bertino’s _début_ at the shop was a bright one of young June, and the baby maples of the Park were showing their first dimples of green. It was the blatant hour when Mulberry’s street bazaar is in full cry; when the sham battle fought every morning between honeyed sellers and scornful buyers is in hot movement; when dimes and coppers are the vender’s prize against flounders, cabbages, saucepans, calicoes, apples, and shoestrings, as the stake that fires the housewife’s tongue and eye; when stout-lunged hucksters cut the din with the siren songs their kind have sung for ages in the market place.