by a
chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were
actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached
and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,
like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked marine
life, the brass shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn
flamelessly and without benefit of fuel.

To enter Abrahm Kantor's--Brasses--was three steps down, so that his
casement show-window, at best filmed over with the constant rain of dust
ground down from the rails above, was obscure enough, but crammed with
the copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so
Biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of
brass all beaten over with little poks. Things: cups, trays, knockers,
ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated
sizes. Jardinieres with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A swinging
lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of tubular
chimes, prisms of voiceless harmony and of heatless light.

Opening this door, they rang gently, like melody heard through water
and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a
pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of
things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still
another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which
overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of
gibbet-looking clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping
union suits in a mid-air flaky with soot.

Often at lunch, or even the evening meal, this bell would ring in on
Abrahm Kantor's digestive well-being, and while he hurried down, napkin
often bib-fashion still about his neck, and into the smouldering lanes
of copper, would leave an eloquent void at the head of his
well-surrounded table.

This bell was ringing now, jingling in upon the slumber of a still newer
Kantor, snuggling peacefully enough within the ammoniac depths of a
cradle recently evacuated by Leon, heretofore impinged upon you.

On her knees before an oven that billowed forth hotly into her face,
Mrs. Kantor, fairly fat and not yet forty, and at the immemorial task of
plumbing a delicately swelling layer-cake with broom-straw, raised her
face, reddened and faintly moist.

"Isadore, run down and