linger, was set weirdly into an old New England cottage, and had,
apparently, fathomless depths. In summer the whole front of it lay
open to the street, and here all day long, beside the table where
the charcoal squares were set to dry, could be seen saffron-coloured
Armenians absorbed in a Turkish game played on a backgammon board, their
gentleness and that of the loiterers looking on in strange contrast with
their hawk-like profiles and burning eyes. Behind this group, in the
half light of the middle interior, could be discerned an American
soda-water fountain of a bygone fashion, on its marble counter
oddly shaped bottles containing rose and violet syrups; there was
a bottle-shaped stove, and on the walls, in gilt frames, pictures
evidently dating from the period in American art that flourished when
Franklin Pierce was President; and there was an array of marble topped
tables extending far back into the shadows. Behind the fountain was
a sort of cupboard--suggestive of the Arabian Nights, which Janet had
never read--from which, occasionally, the fat proprietor emerged bearing
Turkish coffee or long Turkish pipes.

When not thus occupied the proprietor carried a baby. The street swarmed
with babies, and mothers nursed them on the door-steps. And in this
teeming, prolific street one could scarcely move without stepping on a
fat, almond eyed child, though some, indeed, were wheeled; wheeled in
all sorts of queer contrivances by one another, by fathers with
ragged black moustaches and eagle noses who, to the despair of mill
superintendents, had decided in the morning that three days' wages would
since to support their families for the week.... In the midst of the
throng might be seen occasionally the stout and comfortable and not too
immaculate figure of a shovel bearded Syrian priest, in a frock coat
and square-topped "Derby" hat, sailing along serenely, heedless of the
children who scattered out of his path.

Nearby was the quarter of the Canadian French, scarcely now to be called
foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little
towns in the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner
stood almost invariably a "Pharmacie Francaise"; the signs were in
French, and the elders spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor,
retained in their faces, in their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor
look of their ancestors, the coureurs des bois, but the children spoke
English, and the young men, a