Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real
melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I
hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the
enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along
now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street.
Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are
unappreciated. For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep
incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think. And it
is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls,
and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look.
Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks.
And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to
the imagination. The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather,
hides, and oyster houses.

Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in
New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower. But if you snook
around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you'll find one, with a
winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a
dungeon. Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys.
There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and
Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 'Arriet. She always
wears an enormous hat. A fine thing for a 'Arriet to do, I think.
Sometimes the stand is minded by her mother. (I take it, it is her
mother.) An old body who always has her head wrapped in a knitted
affair. A fine thing for an old body to do, I think. Phil May would
have delighted in Frankfort Street. So would Rembrandt. Here comes an
elderly person, evidently George Luk's "My Old Pal," who is balancing a
large bundle of sticks on her head. Across the way is a Whistler
etching; Whistler did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler