h an injured
feeling of generosity unappreciated--they were not legally bound to do
anything. In which they were right. Signor Salvini in life had belonged to
a benefit society of good intentions but poor business ways. It had
therefore become defunct at the time of his death. However, its members
considered their moral obligations and pitied the widow. They were all
poor workingmen, but they dug down into their pockets and raised two
hundred dollars for the stricken family. When the undertaker and the
cemetery and the other civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead
were paid, there was left twenty dollars for the widow to begin life with
anew.

When that weary autumn day had worn to an end, the lingering traces of the
death vigil been removed, the two bare rooms set to rights, and the last
pitying neighbor woman gone to her own, the widow sat with her dumb sorrow
by her slumbering little ones, and faced the future with which she was to
battle alone. Just what advice the directors of the railway that had
killed her husband--harsh words, but something may be allowed the
bitterness of such grief as hers--would have given then, surrounded by
their own sheltered ones at their happy firesides, I don't know. And yet
one might venture a safe guess if only some kind spirit could have brought
them face to face in that hour. But it is a long way from Madison Avenue
to the poor tenements of the Bronx, and even farther--pity our poor
limping democracy!--from the penniless Italian widow to her sister in the
fashionable apartment. As a household servant in the latter the widow
Salvini would have been a sad misfit even without the children; she would
have owned that herself. Her mistress would not have been likely to have
more patience with her. And so that door through which the two might have
met to their mutual good was closed. There were of course the homes for
the little ones, toward the support of which the apartment paid its share
in the tax bills. The thought crossed the mind of their mother as she sat
there, but at the sight of little Louisa and Vincenzo, the baby, sleeping
peacefully side by side, she put it away with a gesture of impatience. It
was enough to lose their father; these she would keep. And she crossed
herself as she bowed reverently toward the print of the Blessed Virgin,
before which burned a devout little taper. Surely, She knew!

It came into her mind as she sat thinking her life out that she had once