ry."

"But, my word, what smells!"

"Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. Down on these streets
we can learn what dogs think of us. But every Saturday night on Grand
Street there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts from an
old woman. They aren't much good to eat--wee nuts, all shell--and they
still sit in the kitchen getting dusty. It was raining when I bought
them and the woman's hair was streaked in her face, but she didn't
mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. Everything on God's
earth was for sale. On the cart next to my old woman's, there was
hardware--sieves, cullenders--kitchen stuff. And on the next, wearing
gear, with women's stockings hung on a rope at the back. A girl came
along carrying a pair of champagne-colored shoes, looking for
stockings to match. Quite a belle. Somebody's girl. Quill, go down
there on a Saturday night. It will make a column for your paper. I
wonder if that girl found her stockings. A black-eyed Italian.

"But what I like best are the windows on the East Side. No one there
ever says that his house is his castle. On the contrary it is his
point of vantage--his outlook--his prospect. His house front never
dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look out of--not openings
for household exhibits--ornamental lamps or china things--at every
window there is a head--somebody looking on the world. There is a
pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes--a recipe for onions--a hint
of fashion--a cure for rheumatism. The street bears the general life.
The home is the street, not merely the crowded space within four
walls. The street is the playground and the club--the common stage,
and these are the galleries and boxes. We come again close to the
beginning of the modern theatre--an innyard with windows round about.
The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders come and go, selling fruit
and red suspenders. An ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen
children on its tailboard."

Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," he said at length,
"that those persons who try to tempt these people out of the congested
city to farms, don't see how falsely they go about it. They should
reproduce the city in miniature--a dozen farmhouses must be huddled
together to make a snug little town, where all the children may play
and where the women, as they work, may talk across the windows. They
must build villages like the farming towns of France.

"But where can one be so sti