foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little towns
in the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner stood
almost invariably a "Pharmacie Francaise"; the signs were in French, and
the elders spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor, retained in
their faces, in their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor look of their
ancestors, the coureurs des bois, but the children spoke English, and the
young men, as they played baseball in the street or in the corner lots
might be heard shouting out derisively the cry of the section hands so
familiar in mill cities, "Doff, you beggars you, doff!"

Occasionally the two girls strayed into that wide thoroughfare not far
from the canal, known by the classic name of Hawthorne, which the
Italians had appropriated to themselves. This street, too, in spite of
the telegraph poles flaunting crude arms in front of its windows, in
spite of the trolley running down its middle, had acquired a character, a
unity all its own, a warmth and picturesqueness that in the lingering
light of summer evenings assumed an indefinable significance. It was not
Italy, but it was something--something proclaimed in the ornate, leaning
lines of the pillared balconies of the yellow tenement on the second
block, in the stone-vaulted entrance of the low house next door, in
fantastically coloured walls, in curtained windows out of which leaned
swarthy, earringed women. Blocking the end of the street, in stern
contrast, was the huge Clarendon Mill with its sinister brick pillars
running up the six stories between the glass. Here likewise the sidewalks
overflowed with children, large-headed, with great, lustrous eyes, mute,
appealing, the eyes of cattle. Unlike American children, they never
seemed to be playing. Among the groups of elders gathered for gossip were
piratical Calabrians in sombre clothes, descended from Greek ancestors,
once the terrors of the Adriatic Sea. The women, lingering in the
doorways, hemmed in by more children, were for the most part squat and