m ready."

They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at
the head of the fourth and the third and the second balustrade down.

"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever
get tired climbing them."

"Yep."

Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of
spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in
arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their
apartment-house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside--the
sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the
fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of
the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of
street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the
baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar
corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags.
Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of
every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every
wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak
and mess of rutabaga.

Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering
creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of
the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soap-box. From it the
voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost
always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles and even a Citizen of
Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a
temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech
than the great out-of-doors!

Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Bagdad of the
petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the
inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox,
surmounted on a stack of three self-provided canned-goods boxes, his
in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost
ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.

"It's a soldier-boy talkin', Gert."

"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.

"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four
down there holding the flag are just privates. You can always tell a
lieutenant by the bar."

"Uh-huh."

"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."

"'Shh-h-h, J