And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the
Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most
impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a
final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.

He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders
hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.

* * * * *

A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to
which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of
which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A
land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a
land that once reached over all the seas.

For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of
the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In
the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts
tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like
this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men
whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff
hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.

This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there
is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned
to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding
veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him.
The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost
somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker