In the rear courts, where gamblers at _morra_ bawled and capered like madmen, rows of pushcarts, their stubby shafts in the air, told of a twenty-four-hour truce in the strategic fray waged between the peddler army and the artful police. The narrow ribbon of sky between the tall tenements had a Sunday look; it was not mottled with shirts of many patches hung out to dry, and the iron fire escapes, stripped of their week-day wash things in the general sprucing up, gave to the eye here and there the colours of Italy. The dingy _caffès_, from whose tenebrous depths tobacco smoke poured with the scent of viands, were crowded with the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani of the rural districts visiting Mulberry for an innocent spree. The jewelry shops were open and doing a lively trade. Young men bought wedding rings and tried them on the fingers of their promised wives, while faint-hearted bachelors, at the same counter, parted with their hard-earned coin for little silver-tipped horns against the evil eye. At the door a brawny flower woman in spickest gingham held a basket of dahlias fresh, mingled with carnations and asters that had lost the bloom of first youth. It was a sure vantage ground for her traffic. The mating couples, proud in their ownership of the wedlock band, stopped at the basket, every one, and close-fisted indeed was the future husband who did not hand a posy to his bride elect. As the wondering Bertino passed, bearded men in the rôle of newsboys bellowed their wares in his ears: “_Il Progresso! L’Araldo! L’Italiano in America! Due soldi!_” Literature got scant nourishment, but tobacco-selling throve, and the man without a lengthy rat-tail cigar in his mouth was marked among his fellows. They were all in their smartest clothes. Starched shirts were too numerous to give their wearers distinction, and not a few of the clean-shaved necks fretted within stiff collars. Here and there dark-skinned young sparks with red neckties puffed cigarettes and showed fine in apparel that smacked of Bowery show-windows. Scarcely a woman was there from whose ears did not hang long pendants of gold, nor a feminine head that did not gleam in oily smoothness. Shawls woven in the gaudy hues and fantastic patterns of Italian looms splashed the throng with colour, and a few of those large-rayed combs that Apennine maidens love to wear glinted in the sunshine of Paradise Park. Much courting went forward on the park benches, the fond ones caring not an atom for the stare of colder eyes, but retaining their entwined pose in sweet oblivion to the rest of Mulberry.