A flock of fellow-pilgrims clattered by at high speed in care of a guide, who charged five cents a head for piloting them safely to the Italian colony. The hatless women, burdened with babies and heavy sacks, struggled bravely to keep up with the men, who carried the umbrellas. Bertino fell in behind, and soon they turned the corner of Franklin Street. Here they got their first glimpse of Mulberry, which lay clearly visible in the distance at the foot of a hill whose summit is Broadway. Beneath the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the street at the Tombs Prison, forming an arching frame for the picture, they could see the pleasant lawn of Paradise Park. It was a bright afternoon, and the broad patch of greensward gleamed like a great emerald down there in the sunlight, and the low-roofed houses all around, with the sun’s fire in their window panes, had a homelike countenance. This was not the image their minds had wrought of Mulberry, where travellers said the people were herded in pens that knew not the light of day. How strange that no one had ever told them it was so cheerful and _bello_! But when they reached the heart of the quarter they had no more thrills from the contemplation of natural beauty. Here the air throbbed with the _staccato_ cadence of south Italian _patois_. The signs over the shops were no longer gibberish, and Bertino blessed the day that he, Armando, and Marianna had paid the mountain pedagogue three liras to teach them words of ordinary size. [Illustration: Bertino’s arrival at Paradise Park.] Mulberry was in its accustomed Sunday manner. Nearly all the shops were closed, and their faces, so smiling on week days in scarlet wreaths of dried peppers, clusters of varnished buffalo cheeses and festoons of Bologna _salame_, now frowned in shabby black or dark-brown shutters. Madre Chiara’s bower, evergreen on working days with chicory and dandelion salad and Savoy cabbage, had vanished with its owner. No gossip-hungry women, with primed ears, bent about the basket of the garlic seller on China Hill, for she was out with everybody to-day in her best clothes. The crippled beggar at the hydrant was not missing, but he shivered in the May sunshine because Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods was not there with her pail of fire. Another important brazier was in Sunday retirement--that of old Cantolini the Gondolier, and in consequence there floated on the air no suave odour of cooking pine cones, whose seed the Napolitani of the Basso Porto so love to munch.