And now while these are the pictures for today there are other pictures of the Giovannitti people I could give you for tomorrow,

And how some of them go to the county agent on winter mornings with their baskets for beans and cornmeal and molasses.

I listen to fellows saying here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good play.

I say there’s no dramatist living can put old Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti into a play with that kindling wood piled on top of her head coming along Peoria Street nine o’clock in the morning.

Dynamiter

I sat with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon eating steak and onions.

And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children and the cause of labor and the working class.

It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be a rich and red-blooded thing.

Yes, his laugh rang like the call of gray birds filled with a glory of joy ramming their winged flight through a rain storm.

His name was in many newspapers as an enemy of the nation and few keepers of churches or schools would open their doors to him.

Over the steak and onions not a word was said of his deep days and nights as a dynamiter.

Only I always remember him as a lover of life, a lover of children, a lover of all free, reckless laughter everywhere—lover of red hearts and red blood the world over.

Mamie

Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.

She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran.

She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day

And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was going to kill herself

When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of Chicago.

She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders of there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is

romance

and big things

and real dreams

that never go smash.

Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work—long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks.