away from the old surroundings. Their experiences in Italy have
been those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have come
directly to them from their struggle with Nature,--such a hand-to-hand
struggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely through
his own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by his
own hands. The women, as in all primitive life, have had more
diversified activities than the men. They have cooked, spun, and
knitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields. Very few
of the peasant men or women can either read or write. They are devoted
to their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remote
relationships, and clannish in their community life.

The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself to
its new surroundings. The men, for the most part, work on railroad
extensions through the summer, under the direction of a _padrone_, who
finds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, and
supplies them with food. The first effect of immigration upon the women
is that of idleness. They no longer work in the fields, nor milk the
goats, nor pick up faggots. The mother of the family buys all the
clothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, of
a cut and fashion beyond her powers. It is, indeed, the most economical
thing for her to do. Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest;
the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni bought
prepared for boiling. All of those outdoor and domestic activities,
which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slipped
away from her. The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbing
interests for the children, their educational value, and incentive to
activity. A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material. For
the hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there are
dozens who have never seen bread baked. The occasional washings and
scrubbings are associated only with discomfort. The child of such a
family receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his city
street life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies in
domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. No
activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would
naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with
wholesome life is made for him.

Italian parents count