Excerpt from The Cart of Many Colors a Story of Italy Signs over the little shops would be written in Italian words; and all the babies would have dark Italian eyes and Shy Italian smiles; and all the people in the street would talk and laugh and sing in Italian; and out of all the doorways would come the smell of Italian cooking. And sometimes, at night, the whole street would be decked and garlanded with little electric lights, red and white and green, to celebrate the birth day Of the Italian saint who used to be the guardian spirit of the old Village in Italy, and who of course had emigrated with his villagers when they came to the new world. The Italians are not the only people who get together in groups and colonies in Our Amer ican cities. The Poles, the Russian Jews, the Germans, the Chinese, all the lonely new immi grants do it. They feel strange and far away from their own lands in this new country, and they want to live next door to some one who understands their language and their Old life. But thoughtful Americans are beginning to see that these little patches of Poland, Germany, Italy, are almost as far from America as if they were still on the other Side of the ocean. Daily messages, by cable and wireless, flash between Italy and America, but between Little Italy and Riverside Drive, in New York, there is no wire less; Mars and the Earth are not more far apart in some ways. It is to help Old Ameri cans and new Americans to get together and understand each other that little books like this one are written, - old Americans whose grand parents were born here, and new Americans whose children will be born here. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.