fell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a vague
pain,--the envy of a race toward another born to a happier clime,--I heard
from him that his whole family was going back to Italy in a month. The
father had at last got together money enough, and the mother, who had long
been an invalid, must be taken home; and, so far as I know, the population
of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, soon or late, to the
native or the ancestral land.

More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have no
other stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our
sympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met the
widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire to
their home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in the flames. She
was our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herself
with a little subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, with a
printed certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhat
conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. These
gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her
object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and the
whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the
nationality of the bearer; but we were put to shame by the decent joy she
manifested in an Italian salutation. There was no longer a question of
imposture in anybody's mind; we gladly paid tribute to her poetic fiction,
and she thanked us with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation
where it belonged. As she turned to go with many good wishes, we pressed
her to have some dinner, but she answered with a compliment insurpassably
flattering, she had just dined--in another palace. The truth is, there is
not a single palace on Benicia Street, and our little box of pine and
paper would hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where these
things are often contrived with great simplicity; but as we had made a