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Suburban Sketches by William Dean Howells
page 22 of 194 (11%)
blithesome troubadour, living

"A merry life in sun and shade,"

as a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and useful
occupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does not
devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside
his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharves
and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his
lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine but
take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day in a chance
passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his father's
personal history.

It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live
that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air,
and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets
in Boston,--with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at their
ground-floor windows; with mouldering archways between the buildings, and
at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna;
with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from
which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and love-making maidens
furtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth below: a place
haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clack
of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossom
of vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, the
travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I found Ferry
Street actually different from this vision in most respects; but as for
the vines and almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the moment of my
encounter with the little tambourine-boy. As we stood and talked, the snow
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