It was just a sprig of holly1, with scarlet2 berries showing against the green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign that pointed3 the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason why it should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the turn of the stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy4 hall, given over to dust and draughts5 all the days of the year, was the last place in which I expected to meet with any sign of Christmas; perhaps it was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday. Whatever the cause, it gave me quite a turn.
I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered7. Probably it had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square, except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves8 of my children, of private views of things hidden from mamma at the bottom of drawers, of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the busi
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ness of the office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind me,—come nobody knew how far,—did it grow yet in the beech10-wood clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish tongue. The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from the Saviour11's brow as it drooped12 under its cruel crown upon the cross.
Back to the long ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the story-book with the little fir tree that pined because it was small, and because the hare jumped over it, and would not be content though the wind and the sun kissed it, and the dews wept over it and told it to rejoice in its young life; and that was so proud when, in the second year, the hare had to go round it, because then it knew it was getting big,—Hans Christian14 Andersen's story that we loved above all the rest; for we knew the tree right well, and the hare; even the tracks it left in the snow we had seen. Ah, those were the Yule-tide seasons, when the old Domkirke shone with a thousand wax candles on Christmas eve; when all business was laid aside to let the world make merry one whole week; when big red apples were roasted
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on the stove, and bigger doughnuts were baked within it for the long feast! Never such had been known since. Christmas to-day is but a name, a memory.
A door slammed below, and let in the noises of the street. The holly rustled15 in the draught6. Some one going out said, "A Merry Christmas to you all!" in a big, hearty16 voice. I awoke from my revery to find myself back in New York with a glad glow at the heart. It was not true. I had only forgotten. It was myself that had changed, not Christmas. That was here, with the old cheer, the old message of good-will, the old royal road to the heart of mankind. How often had I seen its blessed charity, that never corrupts18, make light in the hovels of darkness and despair! how often watched its spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion in those who had, besides themselves, nothing to give! and as often the sight had made whole my faith in human nature. No! Christmas was not of the past, its spirit not dead. The lad who fixed19 the sprig of holly on the stairs knew it; my reporter's note-book bore witness to it. Witness of my contrition20 for the wrong I did the gentle spirit of the holiday, here let the book tell the story of one Christmas in the tenements22 of the poor:—
It is evening in Grand Street. The shops east and west are pouring forth23 their swarms24 of workers. Street and sidewalk are filled with an eager throng25
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of young men and women, chatting gayly, and elbowing the jam of holiday shoppers that linger about the big stores. The street-cars labor26 along, loaded down to the steps with passengers carrying bundles of every size and odd shape. Along the curb27 a string of pedlers hawk28 penny toys in push-carts with noisy clamor, fearless for once of being moved on by the police. Christmas brings a two weeks' respite29 from persecution30 even to the friendless street-fakir. From the window of one brilliantly lighted store a bevy31 of mature dolls in dishabille stretch forth their arms appealingly to a troop of factory-hands passing by. The young men chaff32 the girls, who shriek33 with laughter and run. The policeman on the corner stops beating his hands together to keep warm, and makes a mock attempt to catch them, whereat their shrieks34 rise shriller than ever. "Them stockin's o' yourn 'll be the death o' Santa Claus!" he shouts after them, as they dodge36. And they, looking back, snap saucily37, "Mind yer business, freshy!" But their laughter belies38 their words. "They giv' it to ye straight that time," grins the grocer's clerk, come out to snatch a look at the crowds; and the two swap39 holiday greetings.
At the corner, where two opposing tides of travel form an eddy40, the line of push-carts debouches down the darker side street. In its gloom their torches burn with a fitful glare that wakes black
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shadows among the trusses of the railroad structure overhead. A woman, with worn shawl drawn41 tightly about head and shoulders, bargains with a pedler for a monkey on a stick and two cents' worth of flitter-gold. Five ill-clad youngsters flatten42 their noses against the frozen pane43 of the toy-shop, in ecstasy44 at something there, which proves to be a milk wagon45, with driver, horses, and cans that can be unloaded. It is something their minds can grasp. One comes forth with a penny goldfish of pasteboard clutched tightly in his hand, and, casting cautious glances right and left, speeds across the way to the door of a tenement21, where a little girl stands waiting. "It's yer Chris'mas, Kate," he says, and thrusts it into her eager fist. The black doorway46 swallows them up.
Across the narrow yard, in the basement of the rear house, the lights of a Christmas tree show against the grimy window pane. The hare would never have gone around it, it is so very small. The two children are busily engaged fixing the goldfish upon one of its branches. Three little candles that burn there shed light upon a scene of utmost desolation. The room is black with smoke and dirt. In the middle of the floor oozes48 an oil-stove that serves at once to take the raw edge off the cold and to cook the meals by. Half the window panes49 are broken, and the holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of an old coat hangs out of one, and beats drearily50
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upon the sash when the wind sweeps over the fence and rattles51 the rotten shutters53. The family wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line stretched across the room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates, a discouraged woman sits eying the children's show gloomily. It is evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little ones wear a famished54 look. There are three—the third an infant, put to bed in what was once a baby carriage. The two from the street are pulling it around to get the tree in range. The baby sees it, and crows with delight. The boy shakes a branch, and the goldfish leaps and sparkles in the candle-light.
"See, sister!" he pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands in glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor55, gazes around her, and bursts into a fit of maudlin56 weeping.
The door falls to. Five flights up, another opens upon a bare attic57 room which a patient little woman is setting to rights. There are only three chairs, a box, and a bedstead in the room, but they take a deal of careful arranging. The bed hides the broken plaster in the wall through which the wind came in; each chair-leg stands over a rat-hole, at once to hide it and to keep the rats out. One is left; the box is for that. The plaster of the ceiling is held up with pasteboard patches. I know the story of that attic. It is one of cruel desertion. The woman's husband
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is even now living in plenty with the creature for whom he forsook58 her, not a dozen blocks away, while she "keeps the home together for the childer." She sought justice, but the lawyer demanded a retainer; so she gave it up, and went back to her little ones. For this room that barely keeps the winter wind out she pays four dollars a month, and is behind with the rent. There is scarce bread in the house; but the spirit of Christmas has found her attic. Against a broken wall is tacked59 a hemlock60 branch, the leavings of the corner grocer's fitting-block; pink string from the packing-counter hangs on it in festoons. A tallow dip on the box furnishes the illumination. The children sit up in bed, and watch it with shining eyes.
"We're having Christmas!" they say.
The lights of the Bowery glow like a myriad62 twinkling stars upon the ceaseless flood of humanity that surges ever through the great highway of the homeless. They shine upon long rows of lodging-houses, in which hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of the strange city, are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness; for what desolation is there like that of the careless crowd when all the world rejoices? They shine upon the tempter setting his snares63 there, and upon the missionary64 and the Salvation65 Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye intent upon the outcome
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of the contest; upon the wreck66 that is past hope, and upon the youth pausing on the verge67 of the pit in which the other has long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there are in plenty in the Bowery. Balsam and hemlock and fir stand in groves68 along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands of green embower mission and dive impartially69. Once a year the old street recalls its youth with an effort. It is true that it is largely a commercial effort; that the evergreen70, with an instinct that is not of its native hills, haunts saloon-corners by preference; but the smell of the pine woods is in the air, and—Christmas is not too critical—one is grateful for the effort. It varies with the opportunity. At "Beefsteak John's" it is content with artistically71 embalming72 crullers and mince-pies in green cabbage under the window lamp. Over yonder, where the mile-post of the old lane still stands,—in its unhonored old age become the vehicle of publishing the latest "sure cure" to the world,—a florist73, whose undenominational zeal74 for the holiday and trade outstrips75 alike distinction of creed76 and property, has transformed the sidewalk and the ugly railroad structure into a veritable bower61, spanning it with a canopy77 of green, under which dwell with him, in neighborly good-will, the Young Men's Christian Association and the Jewish tailor next door.
In the next block a "turkey-shoot" is in progress.
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Crowds are trying their luck at breaking the glass balls that dance upon tiny jets of water in front of a marine78 view with the moon rising, yellow and big, out of a silver sea. A man-of-war, with lights burning aloft, labors80 under a rocky coast. Groggy81 sailormen, on shore leave, make unsteady attempts upon the dancing balls. One mistakes the moon for the target, but is discovered in season. "Don't shoot that," says the man who loads the guns; "there's a lamp behind it." Three scared birds in the window recess82 try vainly to snatch a moment's sleep between shots and the trains that go roaring overhead on the elevated road. Roused by the sharp crack of the rifles, they blink at the lights in the street, and peck moodily83 at a crust in their bed of shavings.
The dime84 museum gong clatters85 out its noisy warning that "the lecture" is about to begin. From the concert hall, where men sit drinking beer in clouds of smoke, comes the thin voice of a short-skirted singer, warbling, "Do they think of me at home?" The young fellow who sits near the door, abstractedly making figures in the wet track of the "schooners," buries something there with a sudden restless turn, and calls for another beer. Out in the street a band strikes up. A host with banners advances, chanting an unfamiliar87 hymn88. In the ranks marches a cripple on crutches89. Newsboys follow, gaping90. Under the illuminated92 clock of the Cooper Institute the procession halts, and the leader,
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turning his face to the sky, offers a prayer. The passing crowds stop to listen. A few bare their heads. The devoted93 group, the flapping banners, and the changing torch-light on upturned faces, make a strange, weird94 picture. Then the drum-beat, and the band files into its barracks across the street. A few of the listeners follow, among them the lad from the concert hall, who slinks shamefacedly in when he thinks no one is looking.
Down at the foot of the Bowery is the "panhandlers' beat," where the saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding out all other business than that of keeping lodgers95 to support them. Within call of it, across the square, stands a church which, in the memory of men yet living, was built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences of a day when Madison Square was out in the fields, and Harlem had a foreign sound. The fashionable audiences are gone long since. To-day the church, fallen into premature96 decay, but still handsome in its strong and noble lines, stands as a missionary outpost in the land of the enemy, its builders would have said, doing a greater work than they planned. To-night is the Christmas festival of its English-speaking Sunday-school, and the pews are filled. The banners of United Italy, of modern Hellas, of France and Germany and England, hang side by side with the Chinese dragon and the starry97 flag—signs of the cosmopolitan98 character of the congre
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gation. Greek and Roman Catholics, Jews and joss-worshippers, go there; few Protestants, and no Baptists. It is easy to pick out the children in their seats by nationality, and as easy to read the story of poverty and suffering that stands written in more than one mother's haggard face, now beaming with pleasure at the little ones' glee. A gayly decorated Christmas tree has taken the place of the pulpit. At its foot is stacked a mountain of bundles, Santa Claus's gifts to the school. A self-conscious young man with soap-locks has just been allowed to retire, amid tumultuous applause, after blowing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" on his horn until his cheeks swelled99 almost to bursting. A trumpet100 ever takes the Fourth Ward101 by storm. A class of little girls is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a capital letter on her breast, and has a piece to speak that begins with the letter; together they spell its lesson. There is momentary102 consternation103; one is missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes past the door-keeper, hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless104 Love,'" she says, and makes for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence and the language.
In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish mother with three boys, almost
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in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron105. The woman shrinks in the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches, and applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them. "Tick, tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth and fashion went out long years ago, and poverty came in.
Tick, tick! the world moves, with us—without; without or with. She is the yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day, when they cleared the tenants107 out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley108 against them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep in the deserted109 passsageways, and the vacant floors are given over to evil smells, and to the rats that forage110 in squads111, burrowing112 in the neglected sewers113. The "wall of wrath114" still towers above the buildings in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath at last is wasted.
It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down in a quarrel over the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy115 of hate to generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut
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out sunlight and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last it is to go, Gotham Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath has contributed its share, thus in the end atoning117 for some of the harm it wrought118. Tick! old clock; the world moves. Never yet did Christmas seem less dark on Cherry Hill than since the lights were put out in Gotham Court forever.
In "The Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he can catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of green made of two coffins119 set on end. It has been a good day, he says cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the "good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone. Where the old pig-sty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail120 the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened121 the work of the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a knife has been drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and grass and green shrubs122 took the place of the old rookeries. The Christmas gospel of peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves out. It never had a chance before.
The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the music, bareheaded and with torn shoes,
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but happy; across the Five Points and through "the Bay,"—known to the directory as Baxter Street,—to "the Divide," still Chatham Street to its denizens123, though the aldermen have rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations124 of Greek and Italian children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In one of the crooked126 streets near the river its journey comes to an end. A battered127 door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the creaking stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter86 in the sink: it is to keep it from freezing. There is not a whole window pane in the hall. Time was when this was a fine house harboring wealth and refinement128. It has neither now. In the old parlor129 downstairs a knot of hard-faced men and women sit on benches about a deal table, playing cards. They have a jug130 between them, from which they drink by turns. On the stump131 of a mantel-shelf a lamp burns before a rude print of the Mother of God. No one pays any heed9 to the hand-organ man and his wife as they climb to their attic. There is a colony of them up there—three families in four rooms.
"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant106 of the double flat,—the one with two rooms,—"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand. In the corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in commemoration of the Nativity. A soap-box and two hemlock branches are the ele
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ments. Six tallow candles and a night-light illuminate91 a singular collection of rarities, set out with much ceremonial show. A doll tightly wrapped in swaddling-clothes represents "the Child." Over it stands a ferocious-looking beast, easily recognized as a survival of the last political campaign,—the Tammany tiger,—threatening to swallow it at a gulp132 if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-à-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit133. The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity134 harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with genuine reverence135, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater, making three dollars a week. It is all the money that comes in, for the father has been sick and unable to work eight months and the mother has her hands full: the youngest is a baby in arms. Three of the children go to a charity school, where they are fed, a great help, now the holidays have come to make work slack for sister. The rent is six dollars—two weeks' pay out of the four. The mention of a possible chance of light work for the man brings the daughter with her sewing from the adjoining room, eager to hear. That would be Christmas indeed! "Pietro!" She runs
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to the neighbors to communicate the joyful136 tidings. Pietro comes, with his new-born baby, which he is tending while his wife lies ill, to look at the maestro, so powerful and good. He also has been out of work for months, with a family of mouths to fill, and nothing coming in. His children are all small yet, but they speak English.
"What," I say, holding a silver dime up before the oldest, a smart little chap of seven—"what would you do if I gave you this?"
"Get change," he replies promptly137. When he is told that it is his own, to buy toys with, his eyes open wide with wondering incredulity. By degrees he understands. The father does not. He looks questioningly from one to the other. When told, his respect increases visibly for "the rich gentleman."
They were villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these people and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their patron saint with them. They cluster about his worship here, but the worship is more than an empty form. He typifies to them the old neighborliness of home, the spirit of mutual138 help, of charity, and of the common cause against the common enemy. The community life survives through their saint in the far city to an unsuspected extent. The sick are cared for; the dreaded139 hospital is fenced out. There are no Italian evictions. The saint has paid the rent
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of this attic through two hard months; and here at his shrine140 the Calabrian village gathers, in the persons of these three, to do him honor on Christmas eve.
Where the old Africa has been made over into a modern Italy, since King Humbert's cohorts struck the up-town trail, three hundred of the little foreigners are having an uproarious time over their Christmas tree in the Children's Aid Society's school. And well they may, for the like has not been seen in Sullivan Street in this generation. Christmas trees are rather rarer over here than on the East Side, where the German leavens141 the lump with his loyalty142 to home traditions. This is loaded with silver and gold and toys without end, until there is little left of the original green. Santa Claus's sleigh must have been upset in a snow-drift over here, and righted by throwing the cargo143 overboard, for there is at least a wagon-load of things that can find no room on the tree. The appearance of "teacher" with a double armful of curly-headed dolls in red, yellow, and green Mother-Hubbards, doubtful how to dispose of them, provokes a shout of approval, which is presently quieted by the principal's bell. School is "in" for the preliminary exercises. Afterward144 there are to be the tree and ice-cream for the good children. In their anxiety to prove their title clear, they sit so straight, with
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arms folded, that the whole row bends over backward. The lesson is brief, the answers to the point.
"What do we receive at Christmas?" the teacher wants to know. The whole school responds with a shout, "Dolls and toys!" To the question, "Why do we receive them at Christmas?" the answer is not so prompt. But one youngster from Thompson Street holds up his hand. He knows. "Because we always get 'em," he says; and the class is convinced: it is a fact. A baby wails145 because it cannot get the whole tree at once. The "little mother"—herself a child of less than a dozen winters—who has it in charge, cooes over it, and soothes146 its grief with the aid of a surreptitious sponge-cake evolved from the depths of teacher's pocket. Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally included in their plan, as often the one condition upon which the older children can be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all hands out at work.
The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King," and baby is lulled147 to sleep.
"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse. Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then; the lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up in pails. A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his brown fist.
"Well, Vito, who is he?"
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"McKinley!" pipes the lad, who remembers the election just past; and the school adjourns148 for ice-cream.
It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse149 Santa Claus for his outlay150, and count it a joy, as well they may; for their beneficence sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all wrongs the most cruel,—that of being despoiled151 of their childhood. Sometimes they are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee Jews; and again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the hungriest—the children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one will show him the way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you see, to look them up himself. That must be done for him; and it is done. To the teacher in the Sullivan Street school came one little girl, this last Christmas, with anxious inquiry152 if it was true that he came around with toys.
"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at all." In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no message from him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he couldn't find it," she said soberly. Did the teacher
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think he would come if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and a bell—the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home minding the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite of directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her sister's, with the janitor153's children's in the school. And lo! on Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling154 any day! Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street alley for this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook125 into an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme155 Court bench, with the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of Health against the slum.
But the ice-cream! They eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or squatting156 on the floor; they blow on it, and put it in their pockets to carry home to baby. Two little shavers discovered to be feeding each other, each watching the smack158 develop on the other's lips as the acme159 of his own bliss160, are "cousins"; that is why. Of cake there is a double supply. It is a dozen years since "Fighting Mary," the wildest child in the Seventh Avenue school, taught them a lesson there which they have never forgotten. She was perfectly161 untamable, fighting
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everybody in school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was caught cramming162 the pie into her pocket, after eyeing it with a look of pure ecstasy, but refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her explanation, delivered with a defiant163 look before which the class quailed164. It is recorded, but not in the minutes, that the board of managers wept over Fighting Mary, who, all unconscious of having caused such an astonishing "break," was at that moment engaged in maintaining her prestige and reputation by fighting the gang in the next block. The minutes contain merely a formal resolution to the effect that occasions of mince-pie shall carry double rations116 thenceforth. And the rule has been kept—not only in Seventh Avenue, but in every industrial school—since. Fighting Mary won the biggest fight of her troubled life that day, without striking a blow.
It was in the Seventh Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the truant165 class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling166 out the truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. "That awful Savarese," said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade her take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless Savarese was black-listed for banking167
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up the school door with snow, so that not even the janitor could get out and at him.
Within hail of the Sullivan Street school camps a scattered168 little band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to surprise. They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left in these West Side tenements to eke169 out such a living as they can, weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers170 and pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson Street. There were as many families as one could count on the fingers of both hands when I first came upon them, at the death of old Tamenund, the basket maker171. Last Christmas there were seven. I had about made up my mind that the only real Americans in New York did not keep the holiday at all, when, one Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in, old Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson Street attic—where she was known among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben Wah, and was believed to be the relict of a warrior172 of the name of Benjamin Wah—to the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for a friend who had helped her over a rough spot—the rent, I suppose. The bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained a lot of
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little garments which she had made out of the remnants of blankets and cloth of her own from a younger and better day. "For those," she said, in her French patois173, "who are poorer than myself;" and hobbled away. I found out, a few days later, when I took her picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had scarcely food in the house that Christmas day and not the car fare to take her to church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the window through the winter evening, and watched the sun go down behind the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben Wah, to give her her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband was one, and she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She is a philosopher in her own quaint174 way. "It is no disgrace to be poor," said she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; "but it is sometimes a great inconvenience." Not even the recollection of the vote of censure175 that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the Charitable Ten for surreptitiously supplying an aged47 couple, the special object of their charity, with army plug, could have deterred176 me from taking the hint.
Very likely, my old friend Miss Sherman, in her Broome Street cellar,—it is always the attic or the cellar,—would object to Mrs. Ben Wah's claim to being the only real American in my note-book. She is from Down East, and says "stun177" for stone. In
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her youth she was lady's-maid to a general's wife, the recollection of which military career equally condones178 the cellar and prevents her holding any sort of communication with her common neighbors, who add to the offence of being foreigners the unpardonable one of being mostly men. Eight cats bear her steady company, and keep alive her starved affections. I found them on last Christmas eve behind barricaded179 doors; for the cold that had locked the water-pipes had brought the neighbors down to the cellar, where Miss Sherman's cunning had kept them from freezing. Their tin pans and buckets were even then banging against her door. "They're a miserable180 lot," said the old maid, fondling her cats defiantly181; "but let 'em. It's Christmas. Ah!" she added, as one of the eight stood up in her lap and rubbed its cheek against hers, "they're innocent. It isn't poor little animals that does the harm. It's men and women that does it to each other." I don't know whether it was just philosophy, like Mrs. Ben Wah's, or a glimpse of her story. If she had one, she kept it for her cats.
In a hundred places all over the city, when Christmas comes, as many open-air fairs spring suddenly into life. A kind of Gentile Feast of Tabernacles possesses the tenement districts especially. Green-embowered booths stand in rows at the curb, and the voice of the tin trumpet is heard in the land. The common source of all the show is
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down by the North River, in the district known as "the Farm." Down there Santa Claus establishes headquarters early in December and until past New Year. The broad quay182 looks then more like a clearing in a pine forest than a busy section of the metropolis183. The steamers discharge their loads of fir trees at the piers184 until they stand stacked mountain-high, with foot-hills of holly and ground-ivy trailing off toward the land side. An army train of wagons185 is engaged in carting them away from early morning till late at night; but the green forest grows, in spite of it all, until in places it shuts the shipping186 out of sight altogether. The air is redolent with the smell of balsam and pine. After nightfall, when the lights are burning in the busy market, and the homeward-bound crowds with baskets and heavy burdens of Christmas greens jostle one another with good-natured banter,—nobody is ever cross down here in the holiday season,—it is good to take a stroll through the Farm, if one has a spot in his heart faithful yet to the hills and the woods in spite of the latter-day city. But it is when the moonlight is upon the water and upon the dark phantom187 forest, when the heavy breathing of some passing steamer is the only sound that breaks the stillness of the night, and the watchman smokes his only pipe on the bulwark188, that the Farm has a mood and an atmosphere all its own, full of poetry
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which some day a painter's brush will catch and hold.
Into the ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of picturesqueness189, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive190 yearning191 to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brown-stone streets up-town there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms on stoop and fire-escape, looks out of the front window, and makes the unsightly barber-pole to sprout192 overnight like an Aaron's-rod. Poor indeed is the home that has not its sign of peace over the hearth193, be it but a single sprig of green. A little color creeps with it even into rabbinical Hester Street, and shows in the shop-windows and in the children's faces. The very feather dusters in the pedler's stock take on brighter hues194 for the occasion, and the big knives in the cutler's shop gleam with a lively anticipation195 of the impending196 goose "with fixin's"—a concession197, perhaps, to the commercial rather than the religious holiday: business comes then, if ever. A crowd of ragamuffins camp out at a window where Santa Claus and his wife stand in state, embodiment of the domestic ideal that has not yet gone out of fashion in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement that "A silver present will be given to every purchaser by a real Santa Claus.—M. Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall, two
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cobblers are pegging198 away under an oozy199 lamp that makes a yellow splurge on the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by their bearded faces, but nothing of the environment save a single sprig of holly suspended from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it came with a message of cheer, a thought of wife and children across the sea waiting their summons, God knows. The shop is their house and home. It was once the hall of the tenement; but to save space, enough has been walled in to make room for their bench and bed; the tenants go through the next house. No matter if they are cramped200; by and by they will have room. By and by comes the spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green branch speak of spring and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears their hammers beat a joyous201 tattoo202 past midnight, far into Christmas morning. Who shall say its message has not reached even them in their slum?
Where the noisy trains speed over the iron highway past the second-story windows of Allen Street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the shadow of one of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. A dull gleam behind the cobweb-shrouded window pane supplements the sign over the door, in Yiddish and English: "Old Brasses203." Four crooked and mouldy steps lead to utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer. Fumbling205 along the dank wall, he is left to find the door
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of the shop as best he can. Not a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the Avenue! Yet ladies in furs and silk find this door and the grim old smith within it. Now and then an artist stumbles upon them, and exults206 exceedingly in his find. Two holiday shoppers are even now haggling207 with the coppersmith over the price of a pair of curiously209 wrought brass204 candlesticks. The old man has turned from the forge, at which he was working, unmindful of his callers roving among the dusty shelves. Standing210 there, erect211 and sturdy, in his shiny leather apron, hammer in hand, with the firelight upon his venerable head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and the square paper cap pushed back from a thoughtful, knotty212 brow, he stirs strange fancies. One half expects to see him fashioning a gorget or a sword on his anvil213. But his is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike is in sight than a row of brass shields, destined214 for ornament215, not for battle. Dark shadows chase one another by the flickering216 light among copper208 kettles of ruddy glow, old-fashioned samovars, and massive andirons of tarnished217 brass. The bargaining goes on. Overhead the nineteenth century speeds by with rattle52 and roar; in here linger the shadows of the centuries long dead. The boy at the anvil listens open-mouthed, clutching the bellows-rope.
In Liberty Hall a Jewish wedding is in progress. Liberty! Strange how the word echoes through
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these sweaters' tenements, where starvation is at home half the time. It is an all-consuming passion with these people, whose spirit a thousand years of bondage218 have not availed to daunt219. It breaks out in strikes, when to strike is to hunger and die. Not until I stood by a striking cloak-maker whose last cent was gone, with not a crust in the house to feed seven hungry mouths, yet who had voted vehemently220 in the meeting that day to keep up the strike to the bitter end,—bitter indeed, nor far distant,—and heard him at sunset recite the prayer of his fathers: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the world, that thou hast redeemed222 us as thou didst redeem221 our fathers, hast delivered us from bondage to liberty, and from servile dependence223 to redemption!"—not until then did I know what of sacrifice the word might mean, and how utterly224 we of another day had forgotten. But for once shop and tenement are left behind. Whatever other days may have in store, this is their day of play, when all may rejoice.
The bridegroom, a cloak-presser in a hired dress suit, sits alone and ill at ease at one end of the hall, sipping225 whiskey with a fine air of indifference226, but glancing apprehensively227 toward the crowd of women in the opposite corner that surround the bride, a pale little shop-girl with a pleading, winsome228 face. From somewhere unexpectedly appears a big man in an ill-fitting coat and skullcap, flanked
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on either side by a fiddler, who scrapes away and away, accompanying the improvisator in a plaintive229 minor230 key as he halts before the bride and intones his lay. With many a shrug231 of stooping shoulders and queer excited gesture, he drones, in the harsh, guttural Yiddish of Hester Street, his story of life's joys and sorrows, its struggles and victories in the land of promise. The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy232, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard233 angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax234 comes. The bride bursts into hysterical235 sobs236, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed237 under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable238 collection is taken up.
The tuneful procession moves upon the bridegroom. An Essex Street girl in the crowd, watching them go, says disdainfully: "None of this humbug239 when I get married." It is the straining of young America at the fetters240 of tradition. Ten minutes later, when, between double files of women holding candles, the couple pass to the canopy where the rabbi waits, she has already forgotten; and when the crunching241 of a glass under the bridegroom's heel announces that they are one, and that until the broken pieces be reunited he is hers and hers alone, she joins with all the company in the exulting242 shout
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of "Mozzel tov!" ("Good luck!"). Then the dupka, men and women joining in, forgetting all but the moment, hands on hips243, stepping in time, forward, backward, and across. And then the feast.
They sit at the long tables by squads and tribes. Those who belong together sit together. There is no attempt at pairing off for conversation or mutual entertainment, at speech-making or toasting. The business in hand is to eat, and it is attended to. The bridegroom, at the head of the table, with his shiny silk hat on, sets the example; and the guests emulate244 it with zeal, the men smoking big, strong cigars between mouthfuls. "Gosh! ain't it fine?" is the grateful comment of one curly-headed youngster, bravely attacking his third plate of chicken-stew. "Fine as silk," nods his neighbor in knickerbockers. Christmas, for once, means something to them that they can understand. The crowd of hurrying waiters make room for one bearing aloft a small turkey adorned245 with much tinsel and many paper flowers. It is for the bride, the one thing not to be touched until the next day—one day off from the drudgery246 of housekeeping; she, too, can keep Christmas.
A group of bearded, dark-browed men sit apart, the rabbi among them. They are the orthodox, who cannot break bread with the rest, for fear, though the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled247. They brought their own to the feast, and sit at their
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own table, stern and justified248. Did they but know what depravity is harbored in the impish mind of the girl yonder, who plans to hang her stocking overnight by the window! There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer things happen over here, in the strife249 between the old and the new. The girls of the College Settlement, last summer, felt compelled to explain that the holiday in the country which they offered some of these children was to be spent in an Episcopal clergyman's house, where they had prayers every morning. "Oh," was the mother's indulgent answer, "they know it isn't true, so it won't hurt them."
The bell of a neighboring church tower strikes the vesper hour. A man in working-clothes uncovers his head reverently250, and passes on. Through the vista251 of green bowers252 formed of the grocer's stock of Christmas trees a passing glimpse of flaring253 torches in the distant square is caught. They touch with flame the gilt254 cross towering high above the "White Garden," as the German residents call Tompkins Square. On the sidewalk the holy-eve fair is in its busiest hour. In the pine-board booths stand rows of staring toy dogs alternately with plaster saints. Red apples and candy are hawked255 from carts. Pedlers offer colored candles with shrill35 outcry. A huckster feeding his horse by the curb scatters256, unseen, a share for the sparrows. The cross flashes white against the dark sky.
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In one of the side streets near the East River has stood for thirty years a little mission church, called Hope Chapel257 by its founders258, in the brave spirit in which they built it. It has had plenty of use for the spirit since. Of the kind of problems that beset259 its pastor260 I caught a glimpse the other day, when, as I entered his room, a rough-looking man went out.
"One of my cares," said Mr. Devins, looking after him with contracted brow. "He has spent two Christmas days of twenty-three out of jail. He is a burglar, or was. His daughter has brought him round. She is a seamstress. For three months, now, she has been keeping him and the home, working nights. If I could only get him a job! He won't stay honest long without it; but who wants a burglar for a watchman? And how can I recommend him?"
A few doors from the chapel an alley sets into the block. We halted at the mouth of it.
"Come in," said Mr. Devins, "and wish Blind Jennie a Merry Christmas."
We went in, in single file; there was not room for two. As we climbed the creaking stairs of the rear tenement, a chorus of children's shrill voices burst into song somewhere above.
"It is her class," said the pastor of Hope Chapel, as he stopped on the landing. "They are all kinds. We never could hope to reach them; Jennie can.
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They fetch her the papers given out in the Sunday-school, and read to her what is printed under the pictures; and she tells them the story of it. There is nothing Jennie doesn't know about the Bible."
The door opened upon a low-ceiled room, where the evening shades lay deep. The red glow from the kitchen stove discovered a jam of children, young girls mostly, perched on the table, the chairs, in one another's laps, or squatting on the floor; in the midst of them, a little old woman with heavily veiled face, and wan13, wrinkled hands folded in her lap. The singing ceased as we stepped across the threshold.
"Be welcome," piped a harsh voice with a singular note of cheerfulness in it. "Whose step is that with you, pastor? I don't know it. He is welcome in Jennie's house, whoever he be. Girls, make him to home." The girls moved up to make room.
"Jennie has not seen since she was a child," said the clergyman, gently; "but she knows a friend without it. Some day she shall see the great Friend in his glory, and then she shall be Blind Jennie no more."
The little woman raised the veil from a face shockingly disfigured, and touched the eyeless sockets261. "Some day," she repeated, "Jennie shall see. Not long now—not long!" Her pastor patted her hand. The silence of the dark room was broken by Blind Jennie's voice, rising cracked and quaver
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ing: "Alas262! and did my Saviour bleed?" The shrill chorus burst in:—
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
The light that falls from the windows of the Neighborhood Guild263, in Delancey Street, makes a white path across the asphalt pavement. Within, there is mirth and laughter. The Tenth Ward Social Reform Club is having its Christmas festival. Its members, poor mothers, scrub-women,—the president is the janitress of a tenement near by,—have brought their little ones, a few their husbands, to share in the fun. One little girl has to be dragged up to the grab-bag. She cries at the sight of Santa Claus. The baby has drawn a woolly horse. He kisses the toy with a look of ecstatic bliss, and toddles265 away. At the far end of the hall a game of blindman's-buff is starting up. The aged grandmother, who has watched it with growing excitement, bids one of the settlement workers hold her grandchild, that she may join in; and she does join in, with all the pent-up hunger of fifty joyless years. The worker, looking on, smiles; one has been reached. Thus is the battle against the slum waged and won with the child's play.
Tramp! tramp! comes the to-morrow upon the stage. Two hundred and fifty pairs of little feet, keeping step, are marching to dinner in the Newsboys'
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Lodging-house. Five hundred pairs more are restlessly awaiting their turn upstairs. In prison, hospital, and almshouse to-night the city is host, and gives of her plenty. Here an unknown friend has spread a generous repast for the waifs who all the rest of the days shift for themselves as best they can. Turkey, coffee, and pie, with "vegetubles" to fill in. As the file of eagle-eyed youngsters passes down the long tables, there are swift movements of grimy hands, and shirt-waists bulge266, ragged264 coats sag17 at the pockets. Hardly is the file seated when the plaint rises: "I ain't got no pie! It got swiped on me." Seven despoiled ones hold up their hands.
The superintendent267 laughs—it is Christmas eve. He taps one tentatively on the bulging268 shirt. "What have you here, my lad?"
"Me pie," responds he, with an innocent look; "I wuz scart it would get stole."
A little fellow who has been eying one of the visitors attentively269 takes his knife out of his mouth, and points it at him with conviction.
"I know you," he pipes. "You're a p'lice commissioner270. I seen yer picter in the papers. You're Teddy Roosevelt!"
The clatter of knives and forks ceases suddenly. Seven pies creep stealthily over the edge of the table, and are replaced on as many plates. The visitors laugh. It was a case of mistaken identity.
Farthest down town, where the island narrows
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toward the Battery, and warehouses271 crowd the few remaining tenements, the sombre-hued colony of Syrians is astir with preparation for the holiday. How comes it that in the only settlement of the real Christmas people in New York the corner saloon appropriates to itself all the outward signs of it? Even the floral cross that is nailed over the door of the Orthodox church is long withered and dead; it has been there since Easter, and it is yet twelve days to Christmas by the belated reckoning of the Greek Church. But if the houses show no sign of the holiday, within there is nothing lacking. The whole colony is gone a-visiting. There are enough of the unorthodox to set the fashion, and the rest follow the custom of the country. The men go from house to house, shake hands, and kiss one another on both cheeks, with the salutation, "Kol am va antom Salimoon." "Every year and you are safe," the Syrian guide renders it into English; and a non-professional interpreter amends273 it: "May you grow happier year by year." Arrack made from grapes and flavored with aniseseed, and candy baked in little white balls like marbles, are served with the indispensable cigarette; for long callers, the pipe.
In a top-floor room of one of the darkest of the dilapidated tenements, the dusty window panes of which the last glow in the winter sky is tinging274 faintly with red, a dance is in progress. The guests, most of them fresh from the hillsides of Mount
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Lebanon, squat157 about the room. A reed-pipe and a tambourine275 furnish the music. One has the centre of the floor. With a beer jug filled to the brim on his head, he skips and sways, bending, twisting, kneeling, gesturing, and keeping time, while the men clap their hands. He lies down and turns over, but not a drop is spilled. Another succeeds him, stepping proudly, gracefully276, furling and unfurling a handkerchief like a banner. As he sits down, and the beer goes around, one in the corner, who looks like a shepherd fresh from his pasture, strikes up a song—a far-off, lonesome, plaintive lay. "'Far as the hills,'" says the guide; "a song of the old days and the old people, now seldom heard." All together croon the refrain. The host delivers himself of an epic277 about his love across the seas, with the most agonizing278 expression, and in a shockingly bad voice. He is the worst singer I ever heard; but his companions greet his effort with approving shouts of "Yi! yi!" They look so fierce, and yet are so childishly happy, that at the thought of their exile and of the dark tenement the question arises, "Why all this joy?" The guide answers it with a look of surprise. "They sing," he says, "because they are glad they are free. Did you not know?"
The bells in old Trinity chime the midnight hour. From dark hallways men and women pour forth and hasten to the Maronite church. In the loft79 of the dingy old warehouse272 wax candles burn before
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an altar of brass. The priest, in a white robe with a huge gold cross worked on the back, chants the ritual. The people respond. The women kneel in the aisles279, shrouding280 their heads in their shawls; a surpliced acolyte281 swings his censer; the heavy perfume of burning incense282 fills the hall.
The band at the anarchists283' ball is tuning284 up for the last dance. Young and old float to the happy strains, forgetting injustice285, oppression, hatred286. Children slide upon the waxed floor, weaving fearlessly in and out between the couples—between fierce, bearded men and short-haired women with crimson-bordered kerchiefs. A Punch-and-Judy show in the corner evokes287 shouts of laughter.
Outside the snow is falling. It sifts288 silently into each nook and corner, softens289 all the hard and ugly lines, and throws the spotless mantle290 of charity over the blemishes291, the shortcomings. Christmas morning will dawn pure and white.
I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered7. Probably it had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square, except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves8 of my children, of private views of things hidden from mamma at the bottom of drawers, of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the busi
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ness of the office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind me,—come nobody knew how far,—did it grow yet in the beech10-wood clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish tongue. The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from the Saviour11's brow as it drooped12 under its cruel crown upon the cross.
Back to the long ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the story-book with the little fir tree that pined because it was small, and because the hare jumped over it, and would not be content though the wind and the sun kissed it, and the dews wept over it and told it to rejoice in its young life; and that was so proud when, in the second year, the hare had to go round it, because then it knew it was getting big,—Hans Christian14 Andersen's story that we loved above all the rest; for we knew the tree right well, and the hare; even the tracks it left in the snow we had seen. Ah, those were the Yule-tide seasons, when the old Domkirke shone with a thousand wax candles on Christmas eve; when all business was laid aside to let the world make merry one whole week; when big red apples were roasted
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on the stove, and bigger doughnuts were baked within it for the long feast! Never such had been known since. Christmas to-day is but a name, a memory.
A door slammed below, and let in the noises of the street. The holly rustled15 in the draught6. Some one going out said, "A Merry Christmas to you all!" in a big, hearty16 voice. I awoke from my revery to find myself back in New York with a glad glow at the heart. It was not true. I had only forgotten. It was myself that had changed, not Christmas. That was here, with the old cheer, the old message of good-will, the old royal road to the heart of mankind. How often had I seen its blessed charity, that never corrupts18, make light in the hovels of darkness and despair! how often watched its spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion in those who had, besides themselves, nothing to give! and as often the sight had made whole my faith in human nature. No! Christmas was not of the past, its spirit not dead. The lad who fixed19 the sprig of holly on the stairs knew it; my reporter's note-book bore witness to it. Witness of my contrition20 for the wrong I did the gentle spirit of the holiday, here let the book tell the story of one Christmas in the tenements22 of the poor:—
It is evening in Grand Street. The shops east and west are pouring forth23 their swarms24 of workers. Street and sidewalk are filled with an eager throng25
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of young men and women, chatting gayly, and elbowing the jam of holiday shoppers that linger about the big stores. The street-cars labor26 along, loaded down to the steps with passengers carrying bundles of every size and odd shape. Along the curb27 a string of pedlers hawk28 penny toys in push-carts with noisy clamor, fearless for once of being moved on by the police. Christmas brings a two weeks' respite29 from persecution30 even to the friendless street-fakir. From the window of one brilliantly lighted store a bevy31 of mature dolls in dishabille stretch forth their arms appealingly to a troop of factory-hands passing by. The young men chaff32 the girls, who shriek33 with laughter and run. The policeman on the corner stops beating his hands together to keep warm, and makes a mock attempt to catch them, whereat their shrieks34 rise shriller than ever. "Them stockin's o' yourn 'll be the death o' Santa Claus!" he shouts after them, as they dodge36. And they, looking back, snap saucily37, "Mind yer business, freshy!" But their laughter belies38 their words. "They giv' it to ye straight that time," grins the grocer's clerk, come out to snatch a look at the crowds; and the two swap39 holiday greetings.
At the corner, where two opposing tides of travel form an eddy40, the line of push-carts debouches down the darker side street. In its gloom their torches burn with a fitful glare that wakes black
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shadows among the trusses of the railroad structure overhead. A woman, with worn shawl drawn41 tightly about head and shoulders, bargains with a pedler for a monkey on a stick and two cents' worth of flitter-gold. Five ill-clad youngsters flatten42 their noses against the frozen pane43 of the toy-shop, in ecstasy44 at something there, which proves to be a milk wagon45, with driver, horses, and cans that can be unloaded. It is something their minds can grasp. One comes forth with a penny goldfish of pasteboard clutched tightly in his hand, and, casting cautious glances right and left, speeds across the way to the door of a tenement21, where a little girl stands waiting. "It's yer Chris'mas, Kate," he says, and thrusts it into her eager fist. The black doorway46 swallows them up.
Across the narrow yard, in the basement of the rear house, the lights of a Christmas tree show against the grimy window pane. The hare would never have gone around it, it is so very small. The two children are busily engaged fixing the goldfish upon one of its branches. Three little candles that burn there shed light upon a scene of utmost desolation. The room is black with smoke and dirt. In the middle of the floor oozes48 an oil-stove that serves at once to take the raw edge off the cold and to cook the meals by. Half the window panes49 are broken, and the holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of an old coat hangs out of one, and beats drearily50
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upon the sash when the wind sweeps over the fence and rattles51 the rotten shutters53. The family wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line stretched across the room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates, a discouraged woman sits eying the children's show gloomily. It is evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little ones wear a famished54 look. There are three—the third an infant, put to bed in what was once a baby carriage. The two from the street are pulling it around to get the tree in range. The baby sees it, and crows with delight. The boy shakes a branch, and the goldfish leaps and sparkles in the candle-light.
"See, sister!" he pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands in glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor55, gazes around her, and bursts into a fit of maudlin56 weeping.
The door falls to. Five flights up, another opens upon a bare attic57 room which a patient little woman is setting to rights. There are only three chairs, a box, and a bedstead in the room, but they take a deal of careful arranging. The bed hides the broken plaster in the wall through which the wind came in; each chair-leg stands over a rat-hole, at once to hide it and to keep the rats out. One is left; the box is for that. The plaster of the ceiling is held up with pasteboard patches. I know the story of that attic. It is one of cruel desertion. The woman's husband
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is even now living in plenty with the creature for whom he forsook58 her, not a dozen blocks away, while she "keeps the home together for the childer." She sought justice, but the lawyer demanded a retainer; so she gave it up, and went back to her little ones. For this room that barely keeps the winter wind out she pays four dollars a month, and is behind with the rent. There is scarce bread in the house; but the spirit of Christmas has found her attic. Against a broken wall is tacked59 a hemlock60 branch, the leavings of the corner grocer's fitting-block; pink string from the packing-counter hangs on it in festoons. A tallow dip on the box furnishes the illumination. The children sit up in bed, and watch it with shining eyes.
"We're having Christmas!" they say.
The lights of the Bowery glow like a myriad62 twinkling stars upon the ceaseless flood of humanity that surges ever through the great highway of the homeless. They shine upon long rows of lodging-houses, in which hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of the strange city, are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness; for what desolation is there like that of the careless crowd when all the world rejoices? They shine upon the tempter setting his snares63 there, and upon the missionary64 and the Salvation65 Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye intent upon the outcome
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of the contest; upon the wreck66 that is past hope, and upon the youth pausing on the verge67 of the pit in which the other has long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there are in plenty in the Bowery. Balsam and hemlock and fir stand in groves68 along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands of green embower mission and dive impartially69. Once a year the old street recalls its youth with an effort. It is true that it is largely a commercial effort; that the evergreen70, with an instinct that is not of its native hills, haunts saloon-corners by preference; but the smell of the pine woods is in the air, and—Christmas is not too critical—one is grateful for the effort. It varies with the opportunity. At "Beefsteak John's" it is content with artistically71 embalming72 crullers and mince-pies in green cabbage under the window lamp. Over yonder, where the mile-post of the old lane still stands,—in its unhonored old age become the vehicle of publishing the latest "sure cure" to the world,—a florist73, whose undenominational zeal74 for the holiday and trade outstrips75 alike distinction of creed76 and property, has transformed the sidewalk and the ugly railroad structure into a veritable bower61, spanning it with a canopy77 of green, under which dwell with him, in neighborly good-will, the Young Men's Christian Association and the Jewish tailor next door.
In the next block a "turkey-shoot" is in progress.
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Crowds are trying their luck at breaking the glass balls that dance upon tiny jets of water in front of a marine78 view with the moon rising, yellow and big, out of a silver sea. A man-of-war, with lights burning aloft, labors80 under a rocky coast. Groggy81 sailormen, on shore leave, make unsteady attempts upon the dancing balls. One mistakes the moon for the target, but is discovered in season. "Don't shoot that," says the man who loads the guns; "there's a lamp behind it." Three scared birds in the window recess82 try vainly to snatch a moment's sleep between shots and the trains that go roaring overhead on the elevated road. Roused by the sharp crack of the rifles, they blink at the lights in the street, and peck moodily83 at a crust in their bed of shavings.
The dime84 museum gong clatters85 out its noisy warning that "the lecture" is about to begin. From the concert hall, where men sit drinking beer in clouds of smoke, comes the thin voice of a short-skirted singer, warbling, "Do they think of me at home?" The young fellow who sits near the door, abstractedly making figures in the wet track of the "schooners," buries something there with a sudden restless turn, and calls for another beer. Out in the street a band strikes up. A host with banners advances, chanting an unfamiliar87 hymn88. In the ranks marches a cripple on crutches89. Newsboys follow, gaping90. Under the illuminated92 clock of the Cooper Institute the procession halts, and the leader,
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turning his face to the sky, offers a prayer. The passing crowds stop to listen. A few bare their heads. The devoted93 group, the flapping banners, and the changing torch-light on upturned faces, make a strange, weird94 picture. Then the drum-beat, and the band files into its barracks across the street. A few of the listeners follow, among them the lad from the concert hall, who slinks shamefacedly in when he thinks no one is looking.
Down at the foot of the Bowery is the "panhandlers' beat," where the saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding out all other business than that of keeping lodgers95 to support them. Within call of it, across the square, stands a church which, in the memory of men yet living, was built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences of a day when Madison Square was out in the fields, and Harlem had a foreign sound. The fashionable audiences are gone long since. To-day the church, fallen into premature96 decay, but still handsome in its strong and noble lines, stands as a missionary outpost in the land of the enemy, its builders would have said, doing a greater work than they planned. To-night is the Christmas festival of its English-speaking Sunday-school, and the pews are filled. The banners of United Italy, of modern Hellas, of France and Germany and England, hang side by side with the Chinese dragon and the starry97 flag—signs of the cosmopolitan98 character of the congre
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gation. Greek and Roman Catholics, Jews and joss-worshippers, go there; few Protestants, and no Baptists. It is easy to pick out the children in their seats by nationality, and as easy to read the story of poverty and suffering that stands written in more than one mother's haggard face, now beaming with pleasure at the little ones' glee. A gayly decorated Christmas tree has taken the place of the pulpit. At its foot is stacked a mountain of bundles, Santa Claus's gifts to the school. A self-conscious young man with soap-locks has just been allowed to retire, amid tumultuous applause, after blowing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" on his horn until his cheeks swelled99 almost to bursting. A trumpet100 ever takes the Fourth Ward101 by storm. A class of little girls is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a capital letter on her breast, and has a piece to speak that begins with the letter; together they spell its lesson. There is momentary102 consternation103; one is missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes past the door-keeper, hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless104 Love,'" she says, and makes for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence and the language.
In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish mother with three boys, almost
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in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron105. The woman shrinks in the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches, and applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them. "Tick, tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth and fashion went out long years ago, and poverty came in.
Tick, tick! the world moves, with us—without; without or with. She is the yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day, when they cleared the tenants107 out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley108 against them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep in the deserted109 passsageways, and the vacant floors are given over to evil smells, and to the rats that forage110 in squads111, burrowing112 in the neglected sewers113. The "wall of wrath114" still towers above the buildings in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath at last is wasted.
It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down in a quarrel over the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy115 of hate to generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut
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out sunlight and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last it is to go, Gotham Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath has contributed its share, thus in the end atoning117 for some of the harm it wrought118. Tick! old clock; the world moves. Never yet did Christmas seem less dark on Cherry Hill than since the lights were put out in Gotham Court forever.
In "The Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he can catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of green made of two coffins119 set on end. It has been a good day, he says cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the "good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone. Where the old pig-sty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail120 the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened121 the work of the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a knife has been drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and grass and green shrubs122 took the place of the old rookeries. The Christmas gospel of peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves out. It never had a chance before.
The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the music, bareheaded and with torn shoes,
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but happy; across the Five Points and through "the Bay,"—known to the directory as Baxter Street,—to "the Divide," still Chatham Street to its denizens123, though the aldermen have rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations124 of Greek and Italian children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In one of the crooked126 streets near the river its journey comes to an end. A battered127 door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the creaking stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter86 in the sink: it is to keep it from freezing. There is not a whole window pane in the hall. Time was when this was a fine house harboring wealth and refinement128. It has neither now. In the old parlor129 downstairs a knot of hard-faced men and women sit on benches about a deal table, playing cards. They have a jug130 between them, from which they drink by turns. On the stump131 of a mantel-shelf a lamp burns before a rude print of the Mother of God. No one pays any heed9 to the hand-organ man and his wife as they climb to their attic. There is a colony of them up there—three families in four rooms.
"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant106 of the double flat,—the one with two rooms,—"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand. In the corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in commemoration of the Nativity. A soap-box and two hemlock branches are the ele
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ments. Six tallow candles and a night-light illuminate91 a singular collection of rarities, set out with much ceremonial show. A doll tightly wrapped in swaddling-clothes represents "the Child." Over it stands a ferocious-looking beast, easily recognized as a survival of the last political campaign,—the Tammany tiger,—threatening to swallow it at a gulp132 if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-à-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit133. The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity134 harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with genuine reverence135, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater, making three dollars a week. It is all the money that comes in, for the father has been sick and unable to work eight months and the mother has her hands full: the youngest is a baby in arms. Three of the children go to a charity school, where they are fed, a great help, now the holidays have come to make work slack for sister. The rent is six dollars—two weeks' pay out of the four. The mention of a possible chance of light work for the man brings the daughter with her sewing from the adjoining room, eager to hear. That would be Christmas indeed! "Pietro!" She runs
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to the neighbors to communicate the joyful136 tidings. Pietro comes, with his new-born baby, which he is tending while his wife lies ill, to look at the maestro, so powerful and good. He also has been out of work for months, with a family of mouths to fill, and nothing coming in. His children are all small yet, but they speak English.
"What," I say, holding a silver dime up before the oldest, a smart little chap of seven—"what would you do if I gave you this?"
"Get change," he replies promptly137. When he is told that it is his own, to buy toys with, his eyes open wide with wondering incredulity. By degrees he understands. The father does not. He looks questioningly from one to the other. When told, his respect increases visibly for "the rich gentleman."
They were villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these people and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their patron saint with them. They cluster about his worship here, but the worship is more than an empty form. He typifies to them the old neighborliness of home, the spirit of mutual138 help, of charity, and of the common cause against the common enemy. The community life survives through their saint in the far city to an unsuspected extent. The sick are cared for; the dreaded139 hospital is fenced out. There are no Italian evictions. The saint has paid the rent
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of this attic through two hard months; and here at his shrine140 the Calabrian village gathers, in the persons of these three, to do him honor on Christmas eve.
Where the old Africa has been made over into a modern Italy, since King Humbert's cohorts struck the up-town trail, three hundred of the little foreigners are having an uproarious time over their Christmas tree in the Children's Aid Society's school. And well they may, for the like has not been seen in Sullivan Street in this generation. Christmas trees are rather rarer over here than on the East Side, where the German leavens141 the lump with his loyalty142 to home traditions. This is loaded with silver and gold and toys without end, until there is little left of the original green. Santa Claus's sleigh must have been upset in a snow-drift over here, and righted by throwing the cargo143 overboard, for there is at least a wagon-load of things that can find no room on the tree. The appearance of "teacher" with a double armful of curly-headed dolls in red, yellow, and green Mother-Hubbards, doubtful how to dispose of them, provokes a shout of approval, which is presently quieted by the principal's bell. School is "in" for the preliminary exercises. Afterward144 there are to be the tree and ice-cream for the good children. In their anxiety to prove their title clear, they sit so straight, with
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arms folded, that the whole row bends over backward. The lesson is brief, the answers to the point.
"What do we receive at Christmas?" the teacher wants to know. The whole school responds with a shout, "Dolls and toys!" To the question, "Why do we receive them at Christmas?" the answer is not so prompt. But one youngster from Thompson Street holds up his hand. He knows. "Because we always get 'em," he says; and the class is convinced: it is a fact. A baby wails145 because it cannot get the whole tree at once. The "little mother"—herself a child of less than a dozen winters—who has it in charge, cooes over it, and soothes146 its grief with the aid of a surreptitious sponge-cake evolved from the depths of teacher's pocket. Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally included in their plan, as often the one condition upon which the older children can be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all hands out at work.
The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King," and baby is lulled147 to sleep.
"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse. Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then; the lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up in pails. A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his brown fist.
"Well, Vito, who is he?"
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"McKinley!" pipes the lad, who remembers the election just past; and the school adjourns148 for ice-cream.
It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse149 Santa Claus for his outlay150, and count it a joy, as well they may; for their beneficence sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all wrongs the most cruel,—that of being despoiled151 of their childhood. Sometimes they are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee Jews; and again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the hungriest—the children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one will show him the way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you see, to look them up himself. That must be done for him; and it is done. To the teacher in the Sullivan Street school came one little girl, this last Christmas, with anxious inquiry152 if it was true that he came around with toys.
"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at all." In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no message from him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he couldn't find it," she said soberly. Did the teacher
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think he would come if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and a bell—the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home minding the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite of directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her sister's, with the janitor153's children's in the school. And lo! on Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling154 any day! Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street alley for this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook125 into an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme155 Court bench, with the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of Health against the slum.
But the ice-cream! They eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or squatting156 on the floor; they blow on it, and put it in their pockets to carry home to baby. Two little shavers discovered to be feeding each other, each watching the smack158 develop on the other's lips as the acme159 of his own bliss160, are "cousins"; that is why. Of cake there is a double supply. It is a dozen years since "Fighting Mary," the wildest child in the Seventh Avenue school, taught them a lesson there which they have never forgotten. She was perfectly161 untamable, fighting
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everybody in school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was caught cramming162 the pie into her pocket, after eyeing it with a look of pure ecstasy, but refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her explanation, delivered with a defiant163 look before which the class quailed164. It is recorded, but not in the minutes, that the board of managers wept over Fighting Mary, who, all unconscious of having caused such an astonishing "break," was at that moment engaged in maintaining her prestige and reputation by fighting the gang in the next block. The minutes contain merely a formal resolution to the effect that occasions of mince-pie shall carry double rations116 thenceforth. And the rule has been kept—not only in Seventh Avenue, but in every industrial school—since. Fighting Mary won the biggest fight of her troubled life that day, without striking a blow.
It was in the Seventh Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the truant165 class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling166 out the truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. "That awful Savarese," said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade her take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless Savarese was black-listed for banking167
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up the school door with snow, so that not even the janitor could get out and at him.
Within hail of the Sullivan Street school camps a scattered168 little band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to surprise. They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left in these West Side tenements to eke169 out such a living as they can, weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers170 and pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson Street. There were as many families as one could count on the fingers of both hands when I first came upon them, at the death of old Tamenund, the basket maker171. Last Christmas there were seven. I had about made up my mind that the only real Americans in New York did not keep the holiday at all, when, one Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in, old Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson Street attic—where she was known among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben Wah, and was believed to be the relict of a warrior172 of the name of Benjamin Wah—to the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for a friend who had helped her over a rough spot—the rent, I suppose. The bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained a lot of
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little garments which she had made out of the remnants of blankets and cloth of her own from a younger and better day. "For those," she said, in her French patois173, "who are poorer than myself;" and hobbled away. I found out, a few days later, when I took her picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had scarcely food in the house that Christmas day and not the car fare to take her to church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the window through the winter evening, and watched the sun go down behind the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben Wah, to give her her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband was one, and she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She is a philosopher in her own quaint174 way. "It is no disgrace to be poor," said she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; "but it is sometimes a great inconvenience." Not even the recollection of the vote of censure175 that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the Charitable Ten for surreptitiously supplying an aged47 couple, the special object of their charity, with army plug, could have deterred176 me from taking the hint.
Very likely, my old friend Miss Sherman, in her Broome Street cellar,—it is always the attic or the cellar,—would object to Mrs. Ben Wah's claim to being the only real American in my note-book. She is from Down East, and says "stun177" for stone. In
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her youth she was lady's-maid to a general's wife, the recollection of which military career equally condones178 the cellar and prevents her holding any sort of communication with her common neighbors, who add to the offence of being foreigners the unpardonable one of being mostly men. Eight cats bear her steady company, and keep alive her starved affections. I found them on last Christmas eve behind barricaded179 doors; for the cold that had locked the water-pipes had brought the neighbors down to the cellar, where Miss Sherman's cunning had kept them from freezing. Their tin pans and buckets were even then banging against her door. "They're a miserable180 lot," said the old maid, fondling her cats defiantly181; "but let 'em. It's Christmas. Ah!" she added, as one of the eight stood up in her lap and rubbed its cheek against hers, "they're innocent. It isn't poor little animals that does the harm. It's men and women that does it to each other." I don't know whether it was just philosophy, like Mrs. Ben Wah's, or a glimpse of her story. If she had one, she kept it for her cats.
In a hundred places all over the city, when Christmas comes, as many open-air fairs spring suddenly into life. A kind of Gentile Feast of Tabernacles possesses the tenement districts especially. Green-embowered booths stand in rows at the curb, and the voice of the tin trumpet is heard in the land. The common source of all the show is
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down by the North River, in the district known as "the Farm." Down there Santa Claus establishes headquarters early in December and until past New Year. The broad quay182 looks then more like a clearing in a pine forest than a busy section of the metropolis183. The steamers discharge their loads of fir trees at the piers184 until they stand stacked mountain-high, with foot-hills of holly and ground-ivy trailing off toward the land side. An army train of wagons185 is engaged in carting them away from early morning till late at night; but the green forest grows, in spite of it all, until in places it shuts the shipping186 out of sight altogether. The air is redolent with the smell of balsam and pine. After nightfall, when the lights are burning in the busy market, and the homeward-bound crowds with baskets and heavy burdens of Christmas greens jostle one another with good-natured banter,—nobody is ever cross down here in the holiday season,—it is good to take a stroll through the Farm, if one has a spot in his heart faithful yet to the hills and the woods in spite of the latter-day city. But it is when the moonlight is upon the water and upon the dark phantom187 forest, when the heavy breathing of some passing steamer is the only sound that breaks the stillness of the night, and the watchman smokes his only pipe on the bulwark188, that the Farm has a mood and an atmosphere all its own, full of poetry
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which some day a painter's brush will catch and hold.
Into the ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of picturesqueness189, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive190 yearning191 to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brown-stone streets up-town there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms on stoop and fire-escape, looks out of the front window, and makes the unsightly barber-pole to sprout192 overnight like an Aaron's-rod. Poor indeed is the home that has not its sign of peace over the hearth193, be it but a single sprig of green. A little color creeps with it even into rabbinical Hester Street, and shows in the shop-windows and in the children's faces. The very feather dusters in the pedler's stock take on brighter hues194 for the occasion, and the big knives in the cutler's shop gleam with a lively anticipation195 of the impending196 goose "with fixin's"—a concession197, perhaps, to the commercial rather than the religious holiday: business comes then, if ever. A crowd of ragamuffins camp out at a window where Santa Claus and his wife stand in state, embodiment of the domestic ideal that has not yet gone out of fashion in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement that "A silver present will be given to every purchaser by a real Santa Claus.—M. Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall, two
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cobblers are pegging198 away under an oozy199 lamp that makes a yellow splurge on the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by their bearded faces, but nothing of the environment save a single sprig of holly suspended from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it came with a message of cheer, a thought of wife and children across the sea waiting their summons, God knows. The shop is their house and home. It was once the hall of the tenement; but to save space, enough has been walled in to make room for their bench and bed; the tenants go through the next house. No matter if they are cramped200; by and by they will have room. By and by comes the spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green branch speak of spring and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears their hammers beat a joyous201 tattoo202 past midnight, far into Christmas morning. Who shall say its message has not reached even them in their slum?
Where the noisy trains speed over the iron highway past the second-story windows of Allen Street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the shadow of one of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. A dull gleam behind the cobweb-shrouded window pane supplements the sign over the door, in Yiddish and English: "Old Brasses203." Four crooked and mouldy steps lead to utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer. Fumbling205 along the dank wall, he is left to find the door
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of the shop as best he can. Not a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the Avenue! Yet ladies in furs and silk find this door and the grim old smith within it. Now and then an artist stumbles upon them, and exults206 exceedingly in his find. Two holiday shoppers are even now haggling207 with the coppersmith over the price of a pair of curiously209 wrought brass204 candlesticks. The old man has turned from the forge, at which he was working, unmindful of his callers roving among the dusty shelves. Standing210 there, erect211 and sturdy, in his shiny leather apron, hammer in hand, with the firelight upon his venerable head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and the square paper cap pushed back from a thoughtful, knotty212 brow, he stirs strange fancies. One half expects to see him fashioning a gorget or a sword on his anvil213. But his is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike is in sight than a row of brass shields, destined214 for ornament215, not for battle. Dark shadows chase one another by the flickering216 light among copper208 kettles of ruddy glow, old-fashioned samovars, and massive andirons of tarnished217 brass. The bargaining goes on. Overhead the nineteenth century speeds by with rattle52 and roar; in here linger the shadows of the centuries long dead. The boy at the anvil listens open-mouthed, clutching the bellows-rope.
In Liberty Hall a Jewish wedding is in progress. Liberty! Strange how the word echoes through
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these sweaters' tenements, where starvation is at home half the time. It is an all-consuming passion with these people, whose spirit a thousand years of bondage218 have not availed to daunt219. It breaks out in strikes, when to strike is to hunger and die. Not until I stood by a striking cloak-maker whose last cent was gone, with not a crust in the house to feed seven hungry mouths, yet who had voted vehemently220 in the meeting that day to keep up the strike to the bitter end,—bitter indeed, nor far distant,—and heard him at sunset recite the prayer of his fathers: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the world, that thou hast redeemed222 us as thou didst redeem221 our fathers, hast delivered us from bondage to liberty, and from servile dependence223 to redemption!"—not until then did I know what of sacrifice the word might mean, and how utterly224 we of another day had forgotten. But for once shop and tenement are left behind. Whatever other days may have in store, this is their day of play, when all may rejoice.
The bridegroom, a cloak-presser in a hired dress suit, sits alone and ill at ease at one end of the hall, sipping225 whiskey with a fine air of indifference226, but glancing apprehensively227 toward the crowd of women in the opposite corner that surround the bride, a pale little shop-girl with a pleading, winsome228 face. From somewhere unexpectedly appears a big man in an ill-fitting coat and skullcap, flanked
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on either side by a fiddler, who scrapes away and away, accompanying the improvisator in a plaintive229 minor230 key as he halts before the bride and intones his lay. With many a shrug231 of stooping shoulders and queer excited gesture, he drones, in the harsh, guttural Yiddish of Hester Street, his story of life's joys and sorrows, its struggles and victories in the land of promise. The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy232, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard233 angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax234 comes. The bride bursts into hysterical235 sobs236, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed237 under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable238 collection is taken up.
The tuneful procession moves upon the bridegroom. An Essex Street girl in the crowd, watching them go, says disdainfully: "None of this humbug239 when I get married." It is the straining of young America at the fetters240 of tradition. Ten minutes later, when, between double files of women holding candles, the couple pass to the canopy where the rabbi waits, she has already forgotten; and when the crunching241 of a glass under the bridegroom's heel announces that they are one, and that until the broken pieces be reunited he is hers and hers alone, she joins with all the company in the exulting242 shout
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of "Mozzel tov!" ("Good luck!"). Then the dupka, men and women joining in, forgetting all but the moment, hands on hips243, stepping in time, forward, backward, and across. And then the feast.
They sit at the long tables by squads and tribes. Those who belong together sit together. There is no attempt at pairing off for conversation or mutual entertainment, at speech-making or toasting. The business in hand is to eat, and it is attended to. The bridegroom, at the head of the table, with his shiny silk hat on, sets the example; and the guests emulate244 it with zeal, the men smoking big, strong cigars between mouthfuls. "Gosh! ain't it fine?" is the grateful comment of one curly-headed youngster, bravely attacking his third plate of chicken-stew. "Fine as silk," nods his neighbor in knickerbockers. Christmas, for once, means something to them that they can understand. The crowd of hurrying waiters make room for one bearing aloft a small turkey adorned245 with much tinsel and many paper flowers. It is for the bride, the one thing not to be touched until the next day—one day off from the drudgery246 of housekeeping; she, too, can keep Christmas.
A group of bearded, dark-browed men sit apart, the rabbi among them. They are the orthodox, who cannot break bread with the rest, for fear, though the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled247. They brought their own to the feast, and sit at their
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own table, stern and justified248. Did they but know what depravity is harbored in the impish mind of the girl yonder, who plans to hang her stocking overnight by the window! There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer things happen over here, in the strife249 between the old and the new. The girls of the College Settlement, last summer, felt compelled to explain that the holiday in the country which they offered some of these children was to be spent in an Episcopal clergyman's house, where they had prayers every morning. "Oh," was the mother's indulgent answer, "they know it isn't true, so it won't hurt them."
The bell of a neighboring church tower strikes the vesper hour. A man in working-clothes uncovers his head reverently250, and passes on. Through the vista251 of green bowers252 formed of the grocer's stock of Christmas trees a passing glimpse of flaring253 torches in the distant square is caught. They touch with flame the gilt254 cross towering high above the "White Garden," as the German residents call Tompkins Square. On the sidewalk the holy-eve fair is in its busiest hour. In the pine-board booths stand rows of staring toy dogs alternately with plaster saints. Red apples and candy are hawked255 from carts. Pedlers offer colored candles with shrill35 outcry. A huckster feeding his horse by the curb scatters256, unseen, a share for the sparrows. The cross flashes white against the dark sky.
[116]
In one of the side streets near the East River has stood for thirty years a little mission church, called Hope Chapel257 by its founders258, in the brave spirit in which they built it. It has had plenty of use for the spirit since. Of the kind of problems that beset259 its pastor260 I caught a glimpse the other day, when, as I entered his room, a rough-looking man went out.
"One of my cares," said Mr. Devins, looking after him with contracted brow. "He has spent two Christmas days of twenty-three out of jail. He is a burglar, or was. His daughter has brought him round. She is a seamstress. For three months, now, she has been keeping him and the home, working nights. If I could only get him a job! He won't stay honest long without it; but who wants a burglar for a watchman? And how can I recommend him?"
A few doors from the chapel an alley sets into the block. We halted at the mouth of it.
"Come in," said Mr. Devins, "and wish Blind Jennie a Merry Christmas."
We went in, in single file; there was not room for two. As we climbed the creaking stairs of the rear tenement, a chorus of children's shrill voices burst into song somewhere above.
"It is her class," said the pastor of Hope Chapel, as he stopped on the landing. "They are all kinds. We never could hope to reach them; Jennie can.
[117]
They fetch her the papers given out in the Sunday-school, and read to her what is printed under the pictures; and she tells them the story of it. There is nothing Jennie doesn't know about the Bible."
The door opened upon a low-ceiled room, where the evening shades lay deep. The red glow from the kitchen stove discovered a jam of children, young girls mostly, perched on the table, the chairs, in one another's laps, or squatting on the floor; in the midst of them, a little old woman with heavily veiled face, and wan13, wrinkled hands folded in her lap. The singing ceased as we stepped across the threshold.
"Be welcome," piped a harsh voice with a singular note of cheerfulness in it. "Whose step is that with you, pastor? I don't know it. He is welcome in Jennie's house, whoever he be. Girls, make him to home." The girls moved up to make room.
"Jennie has not seen since she was a child," said the clergyman, gently; "but she knows a friend without it. Some day she shall see the great Friend in his glory, and then she shall be Blind Jennie no more."
The little woman raised the veil from a face shockingly disfigured, and touched the eyeless sockets261. "Some day," she repeated, "Jennie shall see. Not long now—not long!" Her pastor patted her hand. The silence of the dark room was broken by Blind Jennie's voice, rising cracked and quaver
[118]
ing: "Alas262! and did my Saviour bleed?" The shrill chorus burst in:—
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
The light that falls from the windows of the Neighborhood Guild263, in Delancey Street, makes a white path across the asphalt pavement. Within, there is mirth and laughter. The Tenth Ward Social Reform Club is having its Christmas festival. Its members, poor mothers, scrub-women,—the president is the janitress of a tenement near by,—have brought their little ones, a few their husbands, to share in the fun. One little girl has to be dragged up to the grab-bag. She cries at the sight of Santa Claus. The baby has drawn a woolly horse. He kisses the toy with a look of ecstatic bliss, and toddles265 away. At the far end of the hall a game of blindman's-buff is starting up. The aged grandmother, who has watched it with growing excitement, bids one of the settlement workers hold her grandchild, that she may join in; and she does join in, with all the pent-up hunger of fifty joyless years. The worker, looking on, smiles; one has been reached. Thus is the battle against the slum waged and won with the child's play.
Tramp! tramp! comes the to-morrow upon the stage. Two hundred and fifty pairs of little feet, keeping step, are marching to dinner in the Newsboys'
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Lodging-house. Five hundred pairs more are restlessly awaiting their turn upstairs. In prison, hospital, and almshouse to-night the city is host, and gives of her plenty. Here an unknown friend has spread a generous repast for the waifs who all the rest of the days shift for themselves as best they can. Turkey, coffee, and pie, with "vegetubles" to fill in. As the file of eagle-eyed youngsters passes down the long tables, there are swift movements of grimy hands, and shirt-waists bulge266, ragged264 coats sag17 at the pockets. Hardly is the file seated when the plaint rises: "I ain't got no pie! It got swiped on me." Seven despoiled ones hold up their hands.
The superintendent267 laughs—it is Christmas eve. He taps one tentatively on the bulging268 shirt. "What have you here, my lad?"
"Me pie," responds he, with an innocent look; "I wuz scart it would get stole."
A little fellow who has been eying one of the visitors attentively269 takes his knife out of his mouth, and points it at him with conviction.
"I know you," he pipes. "You're a p'lice commissioner270. I seen yer picter in the papers. You're Teddy Roosevelt!"
The clatter of knives and forks ceases suddenly. Seven pies creep stealthily over the edge of the table, and are replaced on as many plates. The visitors laugh. It was a case of mistaken identity.
Farthest down town, where the island narrows
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toward the Battery, and warehouses271 crowd the few remaining tenements, the sombre-hued colony of Syrians is astir with preparation for the holiday. How comes it that in the only settlement of the real Christmas people in New York the corner saloon appropriates to itself all the outward signs of it? Even the floral cross that is nailed over the door of the Orthodox church is long withered and dead; it has been there since Easter, and it is yet twelve days to Christmas by the belated reckoning of the Greek Church. But if the houses show no sign of the holiday, within there is nothing lacking. The whole colony is gone a-visiting. There are enough of the unorthodox to set the fashion, and the rest follow the custom of the country. The men go from house to house, shake hands, and kiss one another on both cheeks, with the salutation, "Kol am va antom Salimoon." "Every year and you are safe," the Syrian guide renders it into English; and a non-professional interpreter amends273 it: "May you grow happier year by year." Arrack made from grapes and flavored with aniseseed, and candy baked in little white balls like marbles, are served with the indispensable cigarette; for long callers, the pipe.
In a top-floor room of one of the darkest of the dilapidated tenements, the dusty window panes of which the last glow in the winter sky is tinging274 faintly with red, a dance is in progress. The guests, most of them fresh from the hillsides of Mount
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Lebanon, squat157 about the room. A reed-pipe and a tambourine275 furnish the music. One has the centre of the floor. With a beer jug filled to the brim on his head, he skips and sways, bending, twisting, kneeling, gesturing, and keeping time, while the men clap their hands. He lies down and turns over, but not a drop is spilled. Another succeeds him, stepping proudly, gracefully276, furling and unfurling a handkerchief like a banner. As he sits down, and the beer goes around, one in the corner, who looks like a shepherd fresh from his pasture, strikes up a song—a far-off, lonesome, plaintive lay. "'Far as the hills,'" says the guide; "a song of the old days and the old people, now seldom heard." All together croon the refrain. The host delivers himself of an epic277 about his love across the seas, with the most agonizing278 expression, and in a shockingly bad voice. He is the worst singer I ever heard; but his companions greet his effort with approving shouts of "Yi! yi!" They look so fierce, and yet are so childishly happy, that at the thought of their exile and of the dark tenement the question arises, "Why all this joy?" The guide answers it with a look of surprise. "They sing," he says, "because they are glad they are free. Did you not know?"
The bells in old Trinity chime the midnight hour. From dark hallways men and women pour forth and hasten to the Maronite church. In the loft79 of the dingy old warehouse272 wax candles burn before
[122]
an altar of brass. The priest, in a white robe with a huge gold cross worked on the back, chants the ritual. The people respond. The women kneel in the aisles279, shrouding280 their heads in their shawls; a surpliced acolyte281 swings his censer; the heavy perfume of burning incense282 fills the hall.
The band at the anarchists283' ball is tuning284 up for the last dance. Young and old float to the happy strains, forgetting injustice285, oppression, hatred286. Children slide upon the waxed floor, weaving fearlessly in and out between the couples—between fierce, bearded men and short-haired women with crimson-bordered kerchiefs. A Punch-and-Judy show in the corner evokes287 shouts of laughter.
Outside the snow is falling. It sifts288 silently into each nook and corner, softens289 all the hard and ugly lines, and throws the spotless mantle290 of charity over the blemishes291, the shortcomings. Christmas morning will dawn pure and white.
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收听单词发音
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1
holly
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| n.[植]冬青属灌木 | |
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scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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3
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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5
draughts
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| n. <英>国际跳棋 | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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8
conclaves
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| n.秘密会议，教皇选举会议，红衣主教团( conclave的名词复数 ) | |
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heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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10
beech
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| n.山毛榉；adj.山毛榉的 | |
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saviour
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| n.拯救者，救星 | |
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12
drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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13
wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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15
rustled
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| v.发出沙沙的声音( rustle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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16
hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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17
sag
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| v.下垂，下跌，消沉；n.下垂，下跌，凹陷，[航海]随风漂流 | |
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18
corrupts
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| （使）败坏( corrupt的第三人称单数 )； （使）腐化； 引起（计算机文件等的）错误； 破坏 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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contrition
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| n.悔罪，痛悔 | |
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21
tenement
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| n.公寓；房屋 | |
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tenements
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| n.房屋，住户，租房子( tenement的名词复数 ) | |
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23
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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swarms
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| 蜂群，一大群( swarm的名词复数 ) | |
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25
throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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27
curb
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| n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制 | |
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28
hawk
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| n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员 | |
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29
respite
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| n.休息，中止，暂缓 | |
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persecution
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| n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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31
bevy
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| n.一群 | |
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32
chaff
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| v.取笑，嘲笑；n.谷壳 | |
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33
shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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34
shrieks
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| n.尖叫声( shriek的名词复数 )v.尖叫( shriek的第三人称单数 ) | |
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35
shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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36
dodge
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| v.闪开，躲开，避开；n.妙计，诡计 | |
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37
saucily
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| adv.傲慢地，莽撞地 | |
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belies
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| v.掩饰( belie的第三人称单数 )；证明（或显示）…为虚假；辜负；就…扯谎 | |
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39
swap
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| n.交换；vt.交换，用...作交易 | |
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40
eddy
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| n.漩涡，涡流 | |
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41
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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42
flatten
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| v.把．．．弄平，使倒伏；使(漆等)失去光泽 | |
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43
pane
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| n.窗格玻璃，长方块 | |
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44
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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45
wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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46
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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47
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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48
oozes
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| v.（浓液等）慢慢地冒出，渗出( ooze的第三人称单数 )；使（液体）缓缓流出；（浓液）渗出，慢慢流出 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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drearily
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| 沉寂地，厌倦地，可怕地 | |
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51
rattles
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| （使）发出格格的响声， （使）作嘎嘎声( rattle的第三人称单数 )； 喋喋不休地说话； 迅速而嘎嘎作响地移动，堕下或走动； 使紧张，使恐惧 | |
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52
rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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53
shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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54
famished
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| adj.饥饿的 | |
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55
stupor
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| v.昏迷；不省人事 | |
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56
maudlin
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| adj.感情脆弱的，爱哭的 | |
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57
attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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58
forsook
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| forsake的过去式 | |
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59
tacked
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| 用平头钉钉( tack的过去式和过去分词 )； 附加，增补； 帆船抢风行驶，用粗线脚缝 | |
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60
hemlock
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| n.毒胡萝卜，铁杉 | |
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61
bower
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| n.凉亭，树荫下凉快之处；闺房；v.荫蔽 | |
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62
myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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63
snares
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| n.陷阱( snare的名词复数 )；圈套；诱人遭受失败（丢脸、损失等）的东西；诱惑物v.用罗网捕捉，诱陷，陷害( snare的第三人称单数 ) | |
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64
missionary
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| adj.教会的，传教(士)的；n.传教士 | |
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salvation
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| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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66
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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67
verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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68
groves
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| 树丛，小树林( grove的名词复数 ) | |
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69
impartially
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| adv.公平地，无私地 | |
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70
evergreen
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| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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71
artistically
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| adv.艺术性地 | |
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72
embalming
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| v.保存（尸体）不腐( embalm的现在分词 )；使不被遗忘；使充满香气 | |
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73
florist
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| n.花商；种花者 | |
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74
zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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75
outstrips
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| v.做得比…更好，（在赛跑等中）超过( outstrip的第三人称单数 ) | |
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76
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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77
canopy
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| n.天篷，遮篷 | |
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78
marine
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| adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵 | |
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79
loft
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| n.阁楼，顶楼 | |
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80
labors
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| v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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81
groggy
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| adj.体弱的；不稳的 | |
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82
recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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83
moodily
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| adv.喜怒无常地；情绪多变地；心情不稳地；易生气地 | |
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84
dime
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| n.（指美国、加拿大的钱币）一角 | |
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85
clatters
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| 盘碟刀叉等相撞击时的声音( clatter的名词复数 ) | |
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86
clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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87
unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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88
hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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89
crutches
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| n.拐杖, 支柱 v.支撑 | |
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90
gaping
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| adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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91
illuminate
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| vt.照亮，照明；用灯光装饰；说明，阐释 | |
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92
illuminated
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| adj.被照明的；受启迪的 | |
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93
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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94
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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95
lodgers
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| n.房客，租住者( lodger的名词复数 ) | |
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96
premature
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| adj.比预期时间早的；不成熟的，仓促的 | |
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97
starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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98
cosmopolitan
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| adj.世界性的，全世界的，四海为家的，全球的 | |
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99
swelled
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| 增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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100
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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101
ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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102
momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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103
consternation
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| n.大为吃惊，惊骇 | |
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104
boundless
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| adj.无限的；无边无际的；巨大的 | |
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105
apron
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| n.围裙；工作裙 | |
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106
tenant
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| n.承租人；房客；佃户；v.租借，租用 | |
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107
tenants
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| n.房客( tenant的名词复数 )；佃户；占用者；占有者 | |
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108
alley
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| n.小巷，胡同；小径，小路 | |
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109
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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110
forage
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| n.(牛马的)饲料，粮草；v.搜寻，翻寻 | |
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111
squads
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| n.（军队中的）班( squad的名词复数 )；（暗杀）小组；体育运动的运动（代表）队；（对付某类犯罪活动的）警察队伍 | |
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112
burrowing
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的现在分词 )；翻寻 | |
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113
sewers
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| n.阴沟，污水管，下水道( sewer的名词复数 ) | |
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114
wrath
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| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
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115
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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116
rations
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| 定量( ration的名词复数 )； 配给量； 正常量； 合理的量 | |
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117
atoning
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| v.补偿，赎（罪）( atone的现在分词 )；补偿，弥补，赎回 | |
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118
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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119
coffins
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| n.棺材( coffin的名词复数 )；使某人早亡[死，完蛋，垮台等]之物 | |
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120
curtail
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| vt.截短，缩短；削减 | |
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121
lessened
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| 减少的，减弱的 | |
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122
shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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123
denizens
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| n.居民，住户( denizen的名词复数 ) | |
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124
delegations
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| n.代表团( delegation的名词复数 )；委托，委派 | |
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125
crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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126
crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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127
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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128
refinement
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| n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼 | |
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129
parlor
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| n.店铺，营业室；会客室，客厅 | |
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130
jug
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| n.(有柄，小口，可盛水等的)大壶，罐，盂 | |
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131
stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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132
gulp
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| vt.吞咽，大口地吸（气）；vi.哽住；n.吞咽 | |
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133
outfit
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| n.（为特殊用途的）全套装备，全套服装 | |
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134
incongruity
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| n.不协调，不一致 | |
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135
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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136
joyful
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|
| adj.欢乐的，令人欢欣的 | |
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137
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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138
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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139
dreaded
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|
| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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140
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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141
leavens
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| v.使（面团）发酵( leaven的第三人称单数 )；在…中掺入改变的因素 | |
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142
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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143
cargo
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| n.(一只船或一架飞机运载的)货物 | |
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144
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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145
wails
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| 痛哭，哭声( wail的名词复数 ) | |
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146
soothes
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| v.安慰( soothe的第三人称单数 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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147
lulled
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| vt.使镇静，使安静（lull的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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148
adjourns
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| （使）休会， （使）休庭( adjourn的第三人称单数 ) | |
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149
reimburse
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| v.补偿，付还 | |
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150
outlay
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| n.费用，经费，支出；v.花费 | |
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151
despoiled
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| v.掠夺，抢劫( despoil的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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152
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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153
janitor
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| n.看门人，管门人 | |
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154
schooling
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| n.教育；正规学校教育 | |
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155
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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156
squatting
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的现在分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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157
squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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158
smack
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| vt.拍，打，掴；咂嘴；vi.含有…意味；n.拍 | |
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159
acme
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| n.顶点，极点 | |
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160
bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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161
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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162
cramming
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| n.塞满，填鸭式的用功v.塞入( cram的现在分词 )；填塞；塞满；（为考试而）死记硬背功课 | |
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163
defiant
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| adj.无礼的，挑战的 | |
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164
quailed
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| 害怕，发抖，畏缩( quail的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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165
truant
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|
| n.懒惰鬼，旷课者；adj.偷懒的，旷课的，游荡的；v.偷懒，旷课 | |
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166
whittling
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| v.切，削（木头），使逐渐变小( whittle的现在分词 ) | |
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167
banking
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| n.银行业，银行学，金融业 | |
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168
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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169
eke
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| v.勉强度日，节约使用 | |
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170
slippers
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| n. 拖鞋 | |
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171
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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172
warrior
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| n.勇士，武士，斗士 | |
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173
patois
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| n.方言；混合语 | |
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174
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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175
censure
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| v./n.责备；非难；责难 | |
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176
deterred
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| v.阻止，制止( deter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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177
stun
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| vt.打昏，使昏迷，使震惊，使惊叹 | |
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178
condones
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| v.容忍，宽恕，原谅( condone的第三人称单数 ) | |
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179
barricaded
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| 设路障于，以障碍物阻塞( barricade的过去式和过去分词 )； 设路障[防御工事]保卫或固守 | |
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180
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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181
defiantly
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| adv.挑战地，大胆对抗地 | |
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182
quay
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| n.码头，靠岸处 | |
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183
metropolis
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| n.首府；大城市 | |
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184
piers
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| n.水上平台( pier的名词复数 )；（常设有娱乐场所的）突堤；柱子；墙墩 | |
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185
wagons
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| n.四轮的运货马车( wagon的名词复数 )；铁路货车；小手推车 | |
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186
shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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187
phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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188
bulwark
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| n.堡垒，保障，防御 | |
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189
picturesqueness
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190
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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191
yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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192
sprout
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| n.芽，萌芽；vt.使发芽，摘去芽；vi.长芽，抽条 | |
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193
hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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194
hues
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| 色彩( hue的名词复数 )； 色调； 信仰； 观点 | |
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195
anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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196
impending
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| a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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197
concession
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| n.让步，妥协；特许(权) | |
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198
pegging
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| n.外汇钉住，固定证券价格v.用夹子或钉子固定( peg的现在分词 )；使固定在某水平 | |
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199
oozy
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| adj.软泥的 | |
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200
cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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201
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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202
tattoo
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| n.纹身，(皮肤上的)刺花纹；vt.刺花纹于 | |
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203
brasses
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| n.黄铜( brass的名词复数 )；铜管乐器；钱；黄铜饰品（尤指马挽具上的黄铜圆片） | |
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204
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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205
fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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206
exults
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| 狂喜，欢跃( exult的第三人称单数 ) | |
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207
haggling
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| v.讨价还价( haggle的现在分词 ) | |
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208
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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209
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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210
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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211
erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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212
knotty
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| adj.有结的，多节的，多瘤的，棘手的 | |
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213
anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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214
destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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215
ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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216
flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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217
tarnished
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| （通常指金属）（使）失去光泽，（使）变灰暗( tarnish的过去式和过去分词 )； 玷污，败坏 | |
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218
bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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219
daunt
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| vt.使胆怯，使气馁 | |
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220
vehemently
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| adv. 热烈地 | |
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221
redeem
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| v.买回，赎回，挽回，恢复，履行（诺言等） | |
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222
redeemed
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| adj. 可赎回的，可救赎的 动词redeem的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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223
dependence
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| n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属 | |
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224
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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225
sipping
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| v.小口喝，呷，抿( sip的现在分词 ) | |
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226
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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227
apprehensively
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| adv.担心地 | |
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228
winsome
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| n.迷人的，漂亮的 | |
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229
plaintive
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| adj.可怜的，伤心的 | |
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230
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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231
shrug
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| v.耸肩(表示怀疑、冷漠、不知等) | |
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232
frenzy
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| n.疯狂，狂热，极度的激动 | |
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233
laggard
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| n.落后者；adj.缓慢的，落后的 | |
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234
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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235
hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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236
sobs
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| 啜泣（声），呜咽（声）( sob的名词复数 ) | |
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237
concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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238
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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239
humbug
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| n.花招，谎话，欺骗 | |
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240
fetters
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| n.脚镣( fetter的名词复数 )；束缚v.给…上脚镣，束缚( fetter的第三人称单数 ) | |
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241
crunching
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| v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的现在分词 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄 | |
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242
exulting
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| vi. 欢欣鼓舞，狂喜 | |
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243
hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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244
emulate
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| v.努力赶上或超越，与…竞争；效仿 | |
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245
adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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246
drudgery
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| n.苦工，重活，单调乏味的工作 | |
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247
defiled
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| v.玷污( defile的过去式和过去分词 )；污染；弄脏；纵列行进 | |
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248
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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249
strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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250
reverently
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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251
vista
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| n.远景，深景，展望，回想 | |
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252
bowers
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| n.（女子的）卧室( bower的名词复数 )；船首锚；阴凉处；鞠躬的人 | |
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253
flaring
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| a.火焰摇曳的，过份艳丽的 | |
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254
gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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255
hawked
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| 通过叫卖主动兜售（hawk的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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256
scatters
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| v.（使）散开， （使）分散，驱散( scatter的第三人称单数 )；撒 | |
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257
chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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258
founders
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| n.创始人( founder的名词复数 ) | |
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259
beset
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| v.镶嵌；困扰，包围 | |
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260
pastor
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| n.牧师，牧人 | |
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261
sockets
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| n.套接字，使应用程序能够读写与收发通讯协定(protocol)与资料的程序( Socket的名词复数 )；孔( socket的名词复数 )；（电器上的）插口；托座；凹穴 | |
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262
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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263
guild
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| n.行会，同业公会，协会 | |
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264
ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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265
toddles
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| v.（幼儿等）东倒西歪地走( toddle的第三人称单数 )；蹒跚行走；溜达；散步 | |
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266
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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267
superintendent
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| n.监督人，主管，总监；(英国)警务长 | |
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268
bulging
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| 膨胀； 凸出（部）； 打气； 折皱 | |
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269
attentively
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| adv.聚精会神地；周到地；谛；凝神 | |
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270
commissioner
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| n.（政府厅、局、处等部门）专员，长官，委员 | |
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271
warehouses
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| 仓库，货栈( warehouse的名词复数 ) | |
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272
warehouse
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| n.仓库；vt.存入仓库 | |
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273
amends
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| n. 赔偿 | |
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274
tinging
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的现在分词 ) | |
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275
tambourine
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| n.铃鼓，手鼓 | |
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276
gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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277
epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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278
agonizing
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| adj.痛苦难忍的；使人苦恼的v.使极度痛苦；折磨(agonize的ing形式) | |
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279
aisles
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| n. (席位间的)通道, 侧廊 | |
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280
shrouding
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| n.覆盖v.隐瞒( shroud的现在分词 )；保密 | |
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281
acolyte
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| n.助手，侍僧 | |
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282
incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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283
anarchists
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| 无政府主义者( anarchist的名词复数 ) | |
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284
tuning
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| n.调谐，调整，调音v.调音( tune的现在分词 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调 | |
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285
injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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286
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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287
evokes
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| 产生，引起，唤起( evoke的第三人称单数 ) | |
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288
sifts
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| v.筛( sift的第三人称单数 )；筛滤；细查；详审 | |
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289
softens
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| （使）变软( soften的第三人称单数 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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290
mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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291
blemishes
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| n.（身体的）瘢点( blemish的名词复数 )；伤疤；瑕疵；污点 | |
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