In these rooms hundreds of patient backs bent over an equal number of pieces of sewing, most of them unbending only to eat and sleep, for all day long and far into the night sometimes the worn stairs creaked with tired feet as the bundle carriers went back and forth and the busy machines purred and whined for rest. There, kenneled in one small room, Hartley had found that men and women worked and slept and ate, there children were born and old men died, and young faces grew white and young backs grew bent. But the busy machines knew no rest, and night after night the young scholar from the city of bells and towers had thrown himself on his hard little bed with the rumble of their wheels in his ears. Yet more than once, too, in his darkest days, the mysterious companionship of those unseen laborers had strangely buoyed up his failing heart. There were other times, though, when he felt that the depressing poverty which so vividly surrounded him had momentarily paralyzed his creative faculties, that the hardness of life as it lay about him had taken the edge from his once keen fancy, that in time he was to be crushed, Tarpeia-like, by the very hand that was to have given him so much. But there was something of the stoic in his make-up. He bore it as best he could, grimly chewing the cud of Repellier's advice that it would all prove a good antidote for Oxford. He still kept a keen eye open for the more picturesque elements in the life about him, and often took a quiet delight in his neighbors' somber gaiety. For with all its long hours of work Hartley had noticed that the tenement was not without its scenes of fleeting merriment. If the hive had its dark days little Pietro Salvatore still whistled away as merrily as ever while he sewed his buttons on boys' knickerbockers, fourteen to the piece, hemmed and ribboned at the back, for eleven cents the pair. And there were sly meetings and coy love-makings and gay marryings, and singing in many different tongues, and the feast-days and the christenings and the noisy enough children always playing about the dim corridors, and pale-faced girls flirting from the little wooden balconies, and the strains of concertinas and fiddles from open windows at night, and shrill laughter through the gloom when the midsummer heat drove the sleepers, men and women and children alike, up on the roof top in search of a breath of air--but always, everywhere, the dull undertone of the machines that buzzed so feverishly away. And there were little parties that sallied forth, all decked in hired finery, for a chowder party on the Sound, and there were excursions off to Paradise Park on a bright Sunday, and every now and then wonderful spreads of which the outside world knew nothing--feasts of green peppers, and grated Parmesan, and freckled bologna, and salame, and lupine beans, and macaroni cooked in oil, and spiced Neapolitan meal cakes, with maraschino sometimes, and fine