In the musty old records of United States District Attorney Edwin W. Sims, in the federal building, is written the story of the tragedy of a little Italian peasant girl. The story is similar in many details to the stories told to Mr. Sims and his assistant, Harry Parkin, by more than 200 black-haired, sloe-eyed beauties from sunny Italy. They had all been imported, brought through the underground railroad of the white slaver, over the Canadian border, down the St. Claire river, through the great lakes and into Chicago. Whether these hunters of the innocent ply their awful calling at home or abroad, their methods are much the same--with the exception that the foreign girl is more hopelessly at their mercy. The story of the tragedy of this little Italian peasant girl, who helped her father till the soil in the vineyards and fields near Naples, is but one of many of similar character, but it is expressive. She was a beautiful little creature. Her form was that of a Venus--her great mass of black hair hung in a dense cloud from her shapely head. One might picture her, before she was enticed into the terrible life of shame, as a little queen among the women of her race. Yet when she was brought into the district attorney's office, having been one of a number of aliens captured in a raid by federal authorities on immoral dives in South Chicago, she was a mass of scars. Her eyes had lost their deep expressive quality. Her nerves seemed to be wrecked. When she was brought into what the sensational newspapers would call the "sweat box" it was clear that she was in a state of abject terror. She stoutly maintained that she had been in this country for more than three years and that she was in a life of shame from choice and not through the criminal act of any person. She attempted to tell how she had come to this country alone, but was unable to tell the name of the steamship on which she had crossed the ocean or how she had reached Chicago. In broken English she said that she had been in a house of ill repute in New York before coming to Chicago and that she had received the scars on her face through an old injury that had happened years before. Assistant District Attorney Parkin, however, was not convinced. He asked her several questions in quick succession. To all of them she quickly answered "three years." This is the length of time immigrants must be in this country before they may be picked up and deported as aliens. It was this answer that convinced him that the girl had been cowed into submission and "schooled" by her procurers under threats. It was through this answer that the white slavers rested their hope that the girl's story would be believed and that they would be safe from criminal prosecution.