to see moving pictures, which are comprehensible in all languages; but instead I found two Italian comedians—a man and a woman—performing on an odd little stage to an audience which roared applause at every line. I was unable to understand a word, but the skill and grace of the performers were evident, also the suave and liquid versification of their lines. The manager walked continually up and down the aisles, rebuking every sound and movement other than legitimate applause with a torrential hiss. Every time a baby squalled—and there were many—the manager sibilated like a python. The audience took this quite for granted, so evidently it is customary. It is a salutary lesson in modesty to attend a performance conducted in a foreign language: there is nothing that so rapidly impresses upon one our stupid provincial ignorance of most tongues but our own.
Little Italy is only a few blocks away from Chestnut street, and yet I daresay thousands of our citizens hardly suspect its existence. If you chance to go down there about 1 o'clock some bright afternoon, when all the children are enjoying the school recess, and see that laughing, romping mass of bright-eyed young citizens, you will wonder whether they are to be congratulated on growing up in this new country of wonderful opportunity, or to be pitied for losing the beauty and old tradition of that storied peninsula so far away.
