The Project Gutenberg EBook of Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ, by
Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes

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Title: Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ

Author: Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes

Release Date: March 7, 2006 [EBook #94]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

by Willa Cather

ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE by Willa Cather

CHAPTER I

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the
head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man
of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a
student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of
Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to
take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still,
contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn
paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked
trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the
river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much
because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few
passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who
hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it
perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there,
looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs
and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down
the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow.
His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood
smoke in the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the
saltiness that came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles
Street between jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after
a moment of uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet,
deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his
s