id not seem
to be the same desperate venture it appears round about Broadway and
Wall Street. Who can describe the settled amiability of those rows of
considerable brown houses, with their heavy oak doors, their pots of
daisies on the stoop, their clear window panes, and now and then the
face of a benignant grandmother peeping from behind lace curtains. The
secret of Brooklyn, perhaps, is contentment, and its cautious residents
do not want the rest of us to know too much about it, lest we all flock
over there in swarms.

We then came to the bustle of Fulton Street, which deserves a book in
itself. Some day we want to revisit a certain section of Fulton Street
where (if we remember rightly) a rotisserie and a certain bookstore
conspire to make one of the pleasantest haunts in our experience. We
don't know exactly what the secret of Brooklyn may be, but we are going
to spend some time over there this spring and lie in wait for it.

ON WAITING FOR THE CURTAIN TO GO UP

[Illustration]

We often wonder whether people are really as human as they appear, or is
it only our imagination? Everybody, we suggest, thinks of others as
being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets
appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also (we are not
dogmatic on this matter) seems to regard himself as existing on a
detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of vivid crisis)
from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

For example, consider the demeanour of people at a theatre while waiting
for the curtain to go up. To note the censoriousness with which they
study each other, one concludes that each deems himself (herself)
singularly blessed as the repository of human correctness.

Incidentally, why is it that one gets so thirsty at the theatre? We
never get thirsty at the movies, or not nearly so thirsty. The other
evening we drank seven paper cups full of water in the intermissions of
a four-act play.

The presence of people sitting behind one is the reason (we fancy) for a
great deal of the queer antics that take place while one is waiting for
the curtain to rise, particularly when it is twenty minutes late in
going up as it was at a certain theatre the other evening. People behind
one have a horrible advantage. One knows that they can hear everything
you say, unless you whisper it in a furtive manner, which makes them
suspect things far worse than any one would be likely to say in a
Phi