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“But, my word, what smells!”

“Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. Down on these streets we can learn what dogs think of us. But every Saturday night on Grand Street there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts from an old woman. They aren’t much good to eat–wee nuts, all shell–and they still sit in the kitchen getting dusty. It was raining when I bought them and the woman’s hair was streaked in her face, but she didn’t mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. Everything on God’s earth was for sale. On the cart next to my old woman’s, there was hardware–sieves, cullenders–kitchen stuff. And on the next, wearing gear, with women’s stockings hung on a rope at the back. A girl came along carrying a pair of champagne-colored shoes, looking for stockings to match. Quite a belle. Somebody’s girl. Quill, go down there on a Saturday night. It will make a column for your paper. I wonder if that girl found her stockings. A black-eyed Italian.

“But what I like best are the windows on the East Side. No one there ever says that his house is his castle. On the contrary it is his point of vantage–his outlook–his prospect. His house front never dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look out of–not openings for household exhibits–ornamental lamps or china things–at every window there is a head–somebody looking on the world. There is a pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes–a recipe for onions–a hint of fashion–a cure for rheumatism. The street bears the general life. The home is the street, not merely the crowded space within four walls. The street is the playground and the club–the common stage, and these are the galleries and boxes. We come again close to the beginning of the modern theatre–an innyard with windows round about. The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders come and go, selling fruit and red suspenders. An ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen children on its tailboard.”

Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. “I wonder,” he said at length, “that those persons who try to tempt these people out of the congested city to farms, don’t see how falsely they go about it. They should reproduce the city in miniature–a dozen farmhouses must be huddled together to make a snug little town, where all the children may play and where the women, as they work, may talk across the windows. They must build villages like the farming towns of France.

“But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? From here even the narrowest fancy reaches out to the four watery corners of the earth. No nose is so green and country-bred that it doesn’t sniff the spices of India. Great ships lie in the channel camouflaged with war. If we could forget the terror of the submarine, would not these lines and stars and colors appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of the far-off seas?

“Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand barrels, oil maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing at fat attention to go aboard. Except for numbers it might appear–although I am rusty at the legend–that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves for roguery when the ship is out to sea. Doubtless if one knocked upon a top and put his ear close upon a barrel, he would hear a villain’s guttural voice inside, asking if the time were come.

“Then there are the theatres and parks, great caverns where a subway is being built. There are geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on dizzy lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus), a roar of traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating–always eating. There has been nothing like this in all the ages. Babylon and Nineveh were only villages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though all the cities of antiquity had packed their bags and moved here to a common spot.”