man idly watches them until they disappear in the white marble
building on the next block. And then, of course, there is always a thin
stream of working folk going to and fro upon their business.

In spring and in fall things brighten a little. Those are the seasons of
processions and religious festivals. Almost every day then, and
sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see
some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of
Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk
banners, strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of
twenty-four pieces, and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come
the religious processions, when the little girls are taken to their
first communion. Six sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight of
a mighty temple or pavilion, all made of colored candles--not the dainty
little pink trifles with rosy shades of perforated paper, that light our
old lady's dining-table--but the great big candles of the Romish Church
(a church which, you may remember, is much affected of the mob,
especially in times of suffering, sickness, or death); mighty candles,
six and eight feet tall, and as thick as your wrist, of red and blue and
green and yellow, arranged in artistic combinations around a statue of
the Virgin. From this splendid structure silken ribbons stream in all
directions, and at the end of each ribbon is a little girl--generally a
pretty little girl--in a white dress bedecked with green bows. And each
little girl leads by the hand one smaller than herself, sometimes a
toddler so tiny that you marvel that it can walk at all. Some of the
little ones are bare-headed, but most of them wear the square head-cloth
of the Italian peasant, such as their mothers and grandmothers wore in
Italy. At each side of the girls marches an escort of proud parents,
very much mixed up with the boys of the families, who generally appear
in their usual street dress, some of them showing through it in
conspicuous places. And before and behind them are bands and drum-corps,
and societies with banners, and it is all a blare of martial music and
primary colors the whole length of the street.

[Illustration]

But these are Mulberry Street's brief carnival seasons, and when their
splendor is departed the block relapses into workaday dulness, and the
procession that marches and counter-marches before Judge Phoenix and
little sister in any one of the l