Perhaps the recollection of this affects your thoughts now, and makes
your mind more active than want.

All the people going through Vandewater Street appear to be
compositors. Fine, strapping, romantic people, compositors, smeared
with ink! Though there are other interests in this street besides
printing. There is a big schoolhouse with every window in it broken;
grand, desolate look to it! There is a delightful sign which says:
"Horse collars, up stairs." There are little homes toward the end of
the street--it is one block long--little, old, two-story, brick
dwelling houses, in charmingly bad repair, with fire escapes, little
stairs twisting up to the doors and iron railings there, and
window-boxes at the windows.

As you turn at Pearl Street to go back again something comes over you.
It is melodrama that comes over you. The vista of this queer, cold,
lonesome, hard little street, down by the great city's river front, was
painted, or something very like it was painted, on back curtains long
ago. The great, gloomy pile of the Bridge rises before over all. To
make it right there should be a scream. A female figure with hair
streaming upward should shoot through the air to black waters below,
where there is a decrepit boat with a man in a striped jersey pulling
at the oars.




V

THAT REVIEWER "CUSS"