acid-eaten race in themselves.

Allen Street, too, still more easterly, and half as wide, is straddled
its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of Elevated
traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence
from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by
the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street,
reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the Elevated
structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual
taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of
life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might
have been a woman leaned out, as she passed, to toss into one Abrahm
Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on
little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up.

Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a
chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were
actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached
and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,
like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked marine
life, the brass-shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn
flamelessly and without benefit of fuel.

To enter Abrahm Kantor's--Brasses, was three steps down, so that his
casement show-window, at best filmed over with the constant rain of dust
ground down from the rails above, was obscure enough, but crammed with
copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so
biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of