n, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters,
where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay
wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent
streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners
to be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so
far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in
glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and
implements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or
stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the
comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then
known to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in
the garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast--and the New
York garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation of
liberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such
visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the
squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should
wrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost as
that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and
baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more
bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong
an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage
now, where in particular are the peaches _d'antan_? where the mounds of
Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our
childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for
oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels
of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white
and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow
been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets
grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal;
domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less
freely--if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the
party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were
added _to_ it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the
public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched
the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected
and scattered fragment