ear leases to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in
the lease provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors
of these houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be
allowed to use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the
shopping district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls.
As it is they are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of
red brick--"

Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.

"Brickdust Row for an even hundred," he cried. "And I own it. Have I
guessed right?"

"The tenants have some such name for it," said Lawyer Oldport.

Blinker arose and jammed his hat down to his eyes.

"Do what you please with it," he said harshly. "Remodel it, burn it,
raze it to the ground. But, man, it's too late I tell you. It's too
late. It's too late. It's too late."

THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER

Besides many other things, Raggles was a poet. He was called a
tramp; but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a
philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer.
But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a
line of verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have been
a Limerick, had it been written. But, to linger with the primary
proposition, Raggles was a poet.

Raggles's specialty, had he been driven to ink and paper, would have
been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women study their
reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a
dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the
cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks
and mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was
a thing with a soul characteristic and distinct; an individual
conglomeration of life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor and
feeling. Two thousand miles to the north and south, east and west,
Raggles wandered in poetic fervor, taking the cities to his breast.
He footed it on dusty roads, or sped magnificently in freight cars,
counting time as of no account. And when he had found the heart of a
city and listened to its secret confession, he strayed on, restless,
to another. Fickle Raggles!--but perhaps he had not met the civic
corporation that could engage and hold his critical fancy.

Through the ancient poets we have learned that the cities are
feminine. So they were to poet Raggles; and his mind carried a
concrete and clear