ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

by Willa Cather




ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE by Willa Cather




CHAPTER I


Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the
head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man
of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a
student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of
Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to
take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still,
contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn
paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked
trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the
river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much
because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few
passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who
hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it
perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there,
looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.