native-born—the best dressed in all the world. Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance to earn enough to keep body and soul together—and let the ward boss and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or less honest counting of votes.
Work—eat—sleep and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.
Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half -veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass half hidden in a murky puddle.
On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some
