hool camps a scattered little
band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to
surprise. They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom
some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left
in these West Side tenements to eke out such a living as they can,
weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers and
pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone
to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson Street. There were as many
families as one could count on the fingers of both hands when I first
came upon them, at the death of old Tamenund, the basket maker. Last
Christmas there were seven. I had about made up my mind that the only
real Americans in New York did not keep the holiday at all, when, one
Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in, old
Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson Street attic--where she was known
among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben Wah, and was
believed to be the relict of a warrior of the name of Benjamin Wah--to
the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for a
friend who had helped her over a rough spot--the rent, I suppose. The
bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained a
lot of little garments which she had made out of the remnants of
blankets and cloth of her own from a younger and better day. "For
those," she said, in her French patois, "who are poorer than myself;"
and hobbled away. I found out, a few days later, when I took her
picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had scarcely food in
the house that Christmas day and not the car fare to take her to
church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the
window through the winter evening, and watched the sun go down behind
the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben Wah, to give her
her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband was one, and
she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She is a
philosopher in her own quaint way. "It is no disgrace to be poor,"
said she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; "but it is
sometimes a great inconvenience." Not even the recollection of the
vote of censure that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the
Charitable Ten for surreptitiously supplying an aged couple, the
special object of their charity, with army plug, could have deterred
me from taking the hint.

Very likely, my old fri