particular.

He shut the lid of his watch with a snap and returned the timepiece to his
waistcoat pocket. Simultaneously he surveyed both sides of the short block
between Seventh and St. Nicholas Avenues with one comprehensive glance.

Presumably he saw nothing of interest to him. It was not a particularly
interesting block, for that matter: though somewhat typical of the
neighborhood. The north side was lined with five-story flat buildings,
their dingy-red brick facades regularly broken by equally dingy brownstone
stoops, as to the ground floor, by open windows as to those above. The
south side was mostly taken up by a towering white apartment hotel with
an ostentatious entrance; against one of whose polished stone pillars the
short and thick-set man was lounging.

The sidewalks, north and south, swarmed with children of assorted ages,
playing with that ferocious energy characteristic of the young of Harlem;
their blood-curdling cries and premature Fourth-of-July fireworks created
an appalling din: to which, however, the more mature denizens had
apparently become callous, through long endurance.

Beyond the party-colored lights of a drug-store window on Seventh Avenue,
the electric arcs were casting a sickly radiance upon the dusty leaves of
the tree-lined drive. The avenue itself was crowded with motor-cars and
horse-drawn pleasure vehicles, mostly bound up-town, their occupants
seeking the cooler airs and wider spaces to be found beyond the Harlem
River and along the Speedway. A few blocks to the west Cathedral Heights
bulked like a great wall, wrapped in purple shadows, its jagged contour
stark against an evening sky of suave old rose.