Watertown Republican

Strange Faces in New York,

From the New York Star.

In seeing a friend off, the other day, whose vessel was moored at a pier on the East River, I had occasion to pass through the lower part of James Street, and was amazed that the former American and Irish population was being forced out by Japanese, Sicilians, and other odd races. Two places struck me as being very interesting. One was a Japanese boarding place, where there seemed to be twenty members of that race. One-half of them seemed to be married, the wives belonging to all kinds of people, from oblique-eyed and black-haired Japs to golden-haired and blue-eyed German women. They were all quiet and orderly, and seemed to be well liked by their neighbors. The other place was a Sicilian restaurant and boarding-house in the same block. Though of the poorest and homeliest kind, it was scrupulously neat and clean. The proprietor, who was cook, waiter and cashier in one, went about the place in his shirt sleeves, with the bosom thrown back, showing a gorgeous undershirt beneath. Around his waist he wore a brilliant sash of some sort of silk. A baby sprawled in a soap box, half filled with rags and shavings, which a small boy dragged slowly with a piece of string from one end of the room to the other. A few customers sat around the place drinking coffee at two cents a cup and eating maccaroni at seven cents a plate. From the ceiling hung dried strings of scarlet peppers, white garlic, and smoke-darkened Bologna sausages. It was altogether a very fair copy of such establishments in Palermo and Naples.