Nibsys Christmas | Page 6

sound of
hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
into the lid of a soap-box that was partly filled with straw. Something
else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the glimpse of
sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby in a white slip,
bedded in straw in a soap-box for a coffin. The man was hammering
down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the bed knelt the mother,
dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had killed her child. Five
hungry, frightened children cowered in the corner, hardly daring to
whisper as they looked from the father to the mother in terror.
There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the
noise of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently, and
a young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone upon
her breast. She went to the poor mother, and putting her hand
soothingly on her head knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The
half-crazed woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into
tears and hid her throbbing head in the other's lap.

The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the
children gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from
her basket bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting, wistful look
into the bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a
moment about the coping outside and fled over the house-tops.
As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an
Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes?" An army of
thousands whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of
home, is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in
such barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat at
four cents--even seven. Beer for a relish--never without beer. But home?
The home that was home even in a bog, with the love of it that has
made Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst of her
suffering--what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
tenements.
Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight
slanted into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and
yellow neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
blackhaired girls--mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and ragpickers
staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and
gambling there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's
tenements, upon Bandits' Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden
by-ways that lead to the tramp's burrows. Shone upon the scene of
annual infant slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums
that is at last to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized man
may not look upon it and live without blushing.
It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches to
poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two
women, one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby
at her breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the soft
Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly, her
elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay-pipe, blackened with age,

between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken room,
but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not the cold
draught from without, in which they shivered; they looked far over the
seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.
"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
beato----"
The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under
Southern, cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend" in Mulberry Street,
and the wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in the language
of their new home, the land of the free: "Less music! More work! Root,
hog, or die!"
Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pig-tail. It
used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a cellar-way
that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even the north
wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as