uarries, the first and more
unpretentious of its suburbs take up--Benson, Maplehurst, and Ridgeway
Heights intervening with one-story brick cottages and two-story
packing-cases--between the smoke of the city and the carefully parked
Queen Anne quietude of Glenwood and Croton Grove.

Over Benson hangs a white haze of limestone, gritty with train and
foundry smoke. At night, the lime-kilns, spotted with white deposits,
burn redly, showing through their open doors like great, inflamed
diphtheretic throats, tongues of flame bursting and licking-out.

Winchester Road, which runs out from the heart of the city to string
these towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most
part, is the great tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel
interurban electric cars, which hum so heavily that even the windows of
outlying cottages titillate.

For blocks, from Benson to Maplehurst and from Maplehurst to Ridgeway
Heights, Winchester Road repeats itself in terms of the butcher, the
baker, the corner saloon. A feed store. A monument-and stone-cutter. A
confectioner. A general-merchandise store, with a glass case of men's
collars outside the entrance. The butcher, the baker, the corner saloon.

At Benson, where this highway cuts through, the city, wreathed in
smoke, and a great oceanic stretch of roofs are in easy view, and at
closer range, an outlying section of public asylums for the city's
discard of its debility and its senility.

Jutting a story above the one-storied march of Winchester Road, The
Convenience Merchandise Corner, Benson, overlooks, from the southeast
up-stairs window, a remote view of the City Hospital, the Ferris wheel
of an amusement-park, and on clear days, the oceanic waves of roof.
Below, within the store, that view is entirely obliterated by a brace of
shelves built across the corresponding window and brilliantly stacked
with ribbons of a score of colors and as many widths. A considerable
flow of daylight thus diverted, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, even
of early afternoon, fades out into half-discernible corners; a rear-wall
display of overalls and striped denim coats crowded back into
indefinitude, the haberdashery counter, with a giant gilt shirt-stud
suspended above, hardly more outstanding.

Even the notions and dry-goods, flanking the right wall in stacks and
bolts, merge into blur, the outline of a white-sateen and corseted
woman's torso surmounting the top-most of the she