able to accompany the Epicure the other day to the Italian market at Ninth and Christian streets, where he purposed to look over the stalls. It was a day of entrancing sunlight, when all that lively district of Little Italy leaped and trembled in the fullness of light and appetizing fluent air. One saw a secret pathos in the effort to reproduce in the flat dull streets of a foreign city something of the color and mirth of Mediterranean soil. One often wonders what fantastic dream or illusion—was it only a steamship poster?—led so many citizens of the loveliest land on earth to forsake their blue hills and opal valleys to people the cheerless byways of American towns? What does Little Italy think of us and our climate in the raw, bitter days of a western winter? Well, now that the letters are speeding homeward telling of the unbelievable approach of prohibition, there will be few enough of those bright-eyed immigrants!
Christian street breathes the Italian genius for good food. After lunching in a well-known Italian restaurant on Catharine street, where the Epicure instructed me in the mysteries of gnocchi, frittura mista, rognone, scallopini al marsala and that marvelously potent clear coffee which seems to the uninstructed to taste more like wine than coffee, and has a curious shimmer of green round the rim of the liquid, we strolled among the pavement stalls of the little market. It seems to me, just from a cursory study of the exhibit, that the secret of Italian gusto for food is that they take
