Page:Newspaper writing and editing.djvu/254



So this itinerant cobbler hunts you up at your shop, takes off your shoes while you sew and caulks up the seams, tacks on soles and heels, and you pay him with a cheerful smile and some small change.

People who go downtown at night rarely miss seeing the man who advertises various things through an electric sign on his chest. He presses a button at intervals and a light flashes urging you to buy a cigar or a stick of gum or something else. The right thing to say, because everyone says it upon passing this individual, is, "That's a fine thing for a grown man to be doing."

Down the bay there is another industry most people never hear of. Enterprising venders owning their own boats meet incoming tramp freighters and sell the crews everything from a pair of mittens to a cough cure. They load their craft with most things you find in a department store and they drive fine bargains with the sailors.

Among the newly arrived immigrants a number of men manage to scrape a living by selling first lessons in English to the strangers struggling with the tongue. These lessons are in the form of simple English sentences followed by the translation in the tongue of the foreigner. Five cents will buy enough assorted conversation to last a new immigrant several weeks.

When in the course of his regular work the reporter comes upon a picturesque bit of local color, as did a writer on the New York Evening Post in going through the Italian quarter of that city, he may use it to as good advantage as the Post reporter did in the following feature story:

Under the tinsel, gilt, and colored paper shrine erected before a café in Mulberry Street, just north of the Bend, there is a picture of St. Mary of the Virgin Mount, and the devout who pass by drop their mites into the plates. The clinking of pennies, nickels, and quarters rings fair and true through the medley of sounds which rise from the crowds about the push-carts, and it is music to the ear of Michel Siniscalchi, giver of this year's festa in honor of the saint.

A year ago they gave a festa in honor of Maria SS. di Monte Vergine, as the placards and lithographs displayed in