in rows; a tray of pigeons with their
iridescent throat feathers catching gleams of the pale sunlight. There
are great sacks of nuts, barrels of cranberries, kegs of olive oil,
thick slabs of yellow cheese. On such a cold day it was pleasant to see
a sign "Peanut Roasters and Warmers."

Passing the gloomy vista of Greenwich Street--under the "L" is one of
those mysterious little vents in the floor of the street from which
issues a continual spout of steam--our Vesey grows more intellectual.
The first thing one sees, going easterly, is a sign: THE TRUTH SEEKER,
_One flight Up_. The temptation is almost irresistible, but then Truth
is always one flight higher up, so one reflects, what's the use? In this
block, while there is still much doing in the way of food--and even food
in the live state, a window full of entertaining chicks and ducklings
clustered round a colony brooder--another of Vesey Street's interests
begins to show itself. Tools. Every kind of tool that gladdens the heart
of man is displayed in various shops. One realizes more and more that
this is a man's street, and indeed (except at the meat market) few of
the gayer sex are to be seen along its pavements. One of the tool shops
has open-air boxes with all manner of miscellaneous oddments, from mouse
traps to oil cans, and you may see delighted enthusiasts poring over the
assortment with the same professional delight that ladies show at a
notion counter. One of the tool merchants, however, seems to have
weakened in his love of city existence, for he has put up a placard:

WANTED TO RENT _Small Farm Must Have Fruit and Spring Water_

How many years of repressed yearning may speak behind that modest
ambition!

Our own taste for amusement leads us (once luncheon dispatched; you
should taste Vesey Street's lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops.
Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey Street for a term of
months, would never need to languish for mental stimulation. Were he
devout, there is always St. Paul's, as we have said; and were he
atheist, what a collection of Bob Ingersoll's essays greets the faring
eye! There is the customary number of copies of "The Pentecost of
Calamity"; it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as though
almost everybody who bought that lively booklet in the early days of the
war must have sold it again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw a
copy of "Hopkins's Pond," that little volume of agreeable sketches