ests on an anvil, using it as a lunch table. Near
Canal Street two men are loading ice into a yellow refrigerator car, and
their practiced motions are pleasant to watch. One stands in the wagon
and swings the big blocks upward with his tongs. The other, on the wagon
roof, seizes the piece deftly and drops it through a trap on top of the
car. The blocks of ice flash and shimmer as they pass through the
sunshine. In Jim O'Dea's blacksmith shop, near Broome Street, fat white
horses are waiting patiently to be shod, while a pink glow wavers
outward from the forge.

[Illustration]

At the corner of Hudson and Broome streets we fell in with our friend
Endymion, it being our purpose to point out to him the house, one of
that block of old red dwellings between Hudson and Varick, which Robert
C. Holliday has described in "Broome Street Straws," a book which we
hope is known to all lovers of New York local colour. Books which have a
strong sense of place, and are born out of particular streets--and
especially streets of an odd, rich, and well-worn flavour--are not any
too frequent. Mr. Holliday's Gissingesque appreciation of the humours of
landladies and all the queer fish that shoal through the backwaters of
New York lodging houses makes this Broome Street neighbourhood
exceedingly pleasant for the pilgrim to examine. It was in Mr.
Holliday's honour that we sallied into a Hudson Street haberdashery,
just opposite the channel of Broome Street, and adorned ourself with a
new soft collar, also having the pleasure of seeing Endymion regretfully
wave away some gorgeous mauve and pink neckwear that the agreeable
dealer laid before him with words of encouragement. We also stood
tranced by a marvellous lithograph advertising a roach powder in a
neighbouring window, and wondered whether Mr. Holliday himself could
have drawn the original in the days when he and Walter Jack Duncan lived
in garrets on Broome Street and were art students together. Certainly
this picture had the vigorous and spirited touch that one would expect
from the draughting wrist of Mr. Holliday. It showed a very terrible
scene, apparently a civil war among the roaches, for one army of these
agile insects was treasonously squirting a house with the commended
specific, and the horrified and stricken inmates were streaming forth
and being carried away in roach ambulances, attended by roach nurses, to
a neighbouring roach cemetery. All done on a large and telling scale,