second-hand book store is romantic, old "St. Elmo" of mid-Victorian
fame. He must have come West by the "Pony Express."

I always stop, if I have time, to look at shoes to be mended. They are
like people who have fallen asleep in public, off their guard and at
their very worst. Take a shoe - a real, old shoe without a foot in it
and it looks so foolish, betraying so mercilessly its owner's bumps and
peculiar toes. There is pathos there, too. A scrub woman's run-down
shoes, a kiddie's scuffed-out toes, a man's clumsy, clay-stained boots
and the happy dancing slippers of a young girl.

Back of the shoes - the cobbler. Cobblers are always philosophers. Not
pretty men, but thinkers. In their little, dingy shops they sit all day
with their eyes down, isolated from the "hum and scum" about them, to
the tune of their "tap, tap, tap," their minds are detached to think and
philosophize and vision.

Now we are at the corner where we turn away from Fillmore street. There
is a window full of dolls. Such a lot of homely dolls. They don't make
pretty dolls any more. They make them to look like humans. "Character"
dolls they call them and they are "characters." Now, when I was a little
girl, they made dolls to look the way you wished human beings could
look. - It is not hard to turn the corner.



In the Lobby of the St. Francis