Project Gutenberg's Short Stories and Essays, by William Dean Howells

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Title: Short Stories and Essays
From "Literature and Life"

Author: William Dean Howells

Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3379]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS ***

Produced by David Widger

LITERATURE AND LIFE--Short Stories and Essays

by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS:

Worries of a Winter Walk
Summer Isles of Eden
Wild Flowers of the Asphalt
A Circus in the Suburbs
A She Hamlet
The Midnight Platoon
The Beach at Rockaway
Sawdust in the Arena
At a Dime Museum
American Literature in Exile
The Horse Show
The Problem of the Summer
Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
From New York into New England
The Art of the Adsmith
The Psychology of Plagiarism
Puritanism in American Fiction
The What and How in Art
Politics in American Authors
Storage
"Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River,
I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization,
which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish
now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful
consideration.

I.

The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was
really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being
tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of
frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of
resentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passing
through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the
sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the
sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no
peddlers' carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four
shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases
in their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the
beer saloons. The bu