ved it on the bounce and struck it with
his fist. According to the score chalked on the pavement the "Bronx
Browns" and the "Haven Athletics" were just finishing a rousing
contest, in which the former were victors, 1-0. Haven Avenue, near
by, is a happy little street perched high above the river. A small
terraced garden with fading flowers looks across the Hudson to the
woody Palisades. Modest apartment houses are built high on enormous
buttresses, over the steep scarp of the hillside. Through cellar
windows coal was visible, piled high in the bins; children were
trooping home for dinner; a fine taint of frying onions hung in the
shining air. Everywhere in that open, half-suburban, comfortable
region was a feeling of sane, established life. An old man with a
white beard was greeted by two urchins, who ran up and kissed him
heartily as he beamed upon them. Grandpa, one supposes! Plenty of
signs indicating small apartments to rent, four and five rooms. And
down that upper slant of Broadway, as the bus bumbles past rows of
neat prosperous-seeming shops, one feels the great tug and pulling
current of life that flows down the channel, the strange energy of
the huge city lying below. The tide was momentarily stilled, but
soon to resume action. There was a magic touch apparent, like the
stillness of a palace in a fairy tale, bewitched into waiting
silence.

* * * * *

Sometimes on our way to the office in the morning we stop in front
of a jeweller's window near Maiden Lane and watch a neat little
elderly gentleman daintily setting out his employer's gauds and
trinkets for the day. We like to see him brood cheerfully over the
disposition of his small amber-coloured velvet mats, and the
arrangement of the rings, vanity cases, necklaces, and precious
stones. They twinkle in the morning light, and he leans downward in
the window, innocently displaying the widening parting on his pink
scalp. He purses his lips in a silent whistle as he cons his shining
trifles and varies his plan of display every day.

Now a modern realist (we have a painful suspicion) if he were
describing this pleasant man would deal rather roughly with him. You
know exactly how it would be done. He would be a weary, saddened,
shabby figure: his conscientious attention to the jewels in his care
would be construed as the painful and creaking routine of a victim
of commercial greed; a bitter irony would be distilled from the
cont