They are the same as they were a thousand or more years gone by.
When the writer was acting as an assistant prosecutor in New York County, a young Italian, barely twenty years of age, was brought to the bar charged with assault with intent to kill.

The complainant was a withered Sicilian woman who claimed to be his wife.

Both spoke an almost unintelligible dialect.

The case on its face was simple enough.

An officer testified that on a Sunday morning in Mulberry Bend Park, at a distance of about fifty feet from where he was standing, he saw the defendant, who had been walking peaceably with the complaining witness, suddenly draw a long and deadly looking knife and proceed to slash her about the head and arms.